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#6
MAR 11 |
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“Chapter Six”
Not the kind of woman who could be described as joyful at the best of times, Bombshell’s demeanor was categorically disgruntled as her head and shoulders emerged from one of the Spot’s floating warp holes. This was because the warp in question was some thirty feet above solid ground and the remainder of her body – everything from the waist down, including a shapely behind and long legs in skintight drainpipe jeans – was currently protruding from an entirely different portal located at floor level. Bombshell was, in a manner of speaking, in two places at the same time. It might have been amusing if the situation wasn’t so critical.
“I feel like a magician’s assistant,” Bombshell complained, as her hands went to work inside the black satchel that was slung about her shoulder. “You know, that stage trick they do when they put the woman in a box and saw her in half, then separate the two pieces?”
“Magician’s assistants tend to smile more,” Mayhem hissed, drifting past on a cloud of emerald gas. She grinned a ghastly grin. Bombshell recoiled, stricken.
“Do you have to fly around like that?” she snapped. “God, it’s like a witch who forgot her broomstick. I think I preferred you when you were silent and scary, and Blot was the one with the smart mouth…”
“Our friend Spot has lost his spark, I fear,” Mayhem murmured.
“Yeah, well, so long as he doesn’t lose his concentration and cut me in half, I couldn’t care less.” Bombshell glared at her undead companion, wrinkling her nose. “Can you please just…vacate? You stink, you creep me out, and I really need to concentrate. This isn’t fun-and-make time with pipe cleaners and modeling clay, you know.”
Setting out her apparatus, using the upper plane of her bosom as a tray, Bombshell began to work with nimble fingers, threading spools of copper wire through blasting caps and other small receptacles pre-primed with plastique explosives, and one other thing – quantities of Mayhem’s toxic gas. When these babies blew, there’d be fallout.
Bombshell loathed Mayhem without question but she wasn’t just being rude in dismissing her; she sincerely did require a moment’s peace so that she could concentrate. She was deft and experienced in what she did, and her additional juggler’s skills granted her the added dexterity required to connect a bomb from its components whilst suspended in mid-air, but even now she was only ever one slip away from premature detonation and losing her arms up to the elbow and most of her face and chest along with them.
Mayhem smiled slyly to herself and then floated off on a magic carpet of green smolder. As Bombshell’s hands worked with remarkable precision high overhead so she tapped the toe of her boot thirty feet below, the only release of anxiety she alowed herself when she was working.
Close by, the Spot was being uncharacteristically morose, not even interested in admiring Bombshell’s eerily disembodied but no less eye-catching backside. Since the succubus Pandemonia had appeared to him in the phantom form of an unrequited love from his past, his chatter had dried up and his manner had become decidedly vengeful. He wanted this job done, not just because that would mean they could all pack up and head on out of Latveria but because he wanted to see his adversary pay with her demonic existence for screwing with his head and his heart.
Zaran the Weapons Master undoubtedly felt the same, what with recently having all but lost his left arm to a devilhound’s bite. The brutish man was soldiering on, his wound staunched – for the time being – by Mayhem’s necrotic toxins, but it was surely only a matter of hours at most before he succumbed to whatever vileness was now slowly spreading through his blood. Chances were he was a dead man walking, but he sure as hell wanted to take Pandemonia with him.
“Heads up,” Zaran snarled, startling Spot from the dark reverie that had claimed him. “We’ve got company…”
The four companions had penetrated the outer wall of the citadel at the summit of Mount Sorcista where Pandemonia was imprisoned, gaining access through use of one of Bombshell’s explosives when they hadn’t been able to locate a traditional entry point. Prisons that no one was ever supposed to visit had little use for doors and windows, apparently. Beyond the wall they’d found themselves in a wide hall shrouded in the thickest darkness any of them had ever known.
Fortunately one of Mayhem’s many variations of chemical vapor, exuded from her ghastly, dead flesh, was a fluorescent, and although this cast their immediate location with an unpleasant green hue it was a welcome illumination nonetheless. Bombshell had set about scanning the hall for the best places to start positioning her explosives, regaling the others with technical data concerning load-bearing walls and angles and stone junctions that none of them understood or even particularly cared about. They simply trusted her expertise and, if she said that a certain amount of nitroglycerine would cause more devastation in one site as opposed to another, then they weren’t going to argue. The fact that a couple of those sites were in the corners of the hall’s ceiling rather than at ground level wasn’t even a problem, not with Spot able to conjure warps wherever she needed to reach.
It was intelligent teamwork, and effective; Victor Von Doom had chosen his emissaries well.
The villains were expecting hostile resistance at any time so, when a new batch of devilhounds emerged from the darkness at the far end of the hall and commenced a swift advance, shrieking and slathering in their hunger for souls and flesh, the only surprise was that their appearance had taken so long to occur.
The bats, however, were more unexpected. As the hounds closed in at floor level so the shadows overhead suddenly erupted with the fury of leathery wings and then a cluster of four-winged bats with forked tails and toxic blood spit entered the sphere of Mayhem’s light.
The undead woman wasn’t daunted. Instead she smiled with delight, arms spread and back arched, like a dancer upon her stage of smoke and mist.
“Mine,” she said, with a vicious hiss. And then she joined battle, all pirouette and claw and venom as the bats thrashed and bit and scratched in turn.
Down below, Spot and Zaran stood firm, side by side, their concentration absolute. The first band of hounds they’d fought, Zaran had engaged them head on with much bravado whilst Spot had cowered. This time their manner was entirely more clinical, and when Zaran offered his ally the use of a scimitar Spot accepted without hesitation.
“How long do you need, Wendy?” Spot called, testing the weight of his new weapon.
“Two minutes maximum. Half that if I could just get these bastard caps not to cross-thread. Just like Hydra, shoddy merchandise all the damn way. No wonder they suck…”
Spot grimaced. “Yes,” he said, quietly. “Let’s do this then.”
The devilhounds screamed and lunged – and then Spot thrust out his free hand and unleashed a blizzard of shimmering black warps, filling the emerald-lit hall with splatters of darkness, like teardrops of oil suspended in green glass. The first few hounds refused to sacrifice their momentum and so plunged headfirst into these scattered portals. The second wave faltered, some skidding on into the warps regardless, but even those that managed to baulk or swerve to avoid the looming gateways found themselves peppered by their own brethren, emerging from these same warps but now traveling in completely different directions from their original trajectories.
A hound would thrust into one warp and shoot out of another at reciprocal velocity, slamming into a wall or one of its fellows with a crunch of bones; another would slide helplessly into a dimensional aperture and reappear twenty feet up in the air, plunging down to earth with a howl of distress, one that was truncated rather abruptly as it impacted with the rocky floor.
It was chaos, but this moment belonged to the humans, not the demons. Not a one of the hounds managed to breach the wall of glimmering warps to approach Spot and Zaran, although once the pack had realized their enemies’ ploy they ceased their charge entirely, intending to pick their way through the dimensional minefield. This was Zaran’s cue to ensure they never had the chance.
The Weapons Master now hefted his customized, automatic crossbow with his one good arm, a thin but lengthy magazine clip slung about his massive chest and shoulders. This clip didn’t contain bullets but rather hundreds of miniature shuriken laced with Mayhem’s unique toxin. Zaran grinned sourly, his eyes blacker still than Spot’s warps.
“Bite this, you mangy horde of hell-bastards,” he snarled...and then he jammed his finger down on the release trigger.
The air was abruptly filled with the siren’s song of spinning metal and the staccato glint of neon green, swiftly followed by a fog of smoke and blood and sizzling flesh as the remaining devilhounds were peppered with venom-anointed shuriken. The spinning discs of serrated metal ripped through their demonic hides and embedded deep in hearts and lungs and bowels, whereupon Mayhem’s toxin instantly began to go to work, dissolving them from the inside out.
The hounds screamed and writhed, falling in bloody swathes. There were some Zaran didn’t nail but Spot took care of these with his sword.
It was slaughter.
It was also, as Zaran would attest, the most beautiful art. For all his earlier moaning that the other man should have packed an Uzi, Spot couldn’t help but agree.
When the hounds were done, Zaran turned his bow upon the bat creatures that were circling up above. He ignored those that were already raining down in smoldering shreds as Mayhem tore through them and concentrated instead on those that were attempting to flock about Bombshell. Another blizzard of steel, green and bright, like an aurora borealis of death. Art.
“Done,” Bombshell reported, her lower body pulling back from the floor-level warp and dragging her upper torso back through with it. She cradled her satchel in her arms, her expression haggard. Her untidy blonde hair was decorated with pieces of smoking bat. Her eyes were tired. She’d set a number of bombs in a short space of time and she was beginning to fray.
“Let’s keep moving,” Zaran said with a grin, finally letting his weapon drop and then glancing round, admiring his handiwork. His eyes gleamed, but his brow was covered with dark perspiration again and he was shaking slightly. Bombshell noticed that the necrosis in his wounded left arm had now spread to his shoulder like the insidious plague that it was. She glanced at Spot, her gaze desperate, but he was already plowing ahead along the hall, collecting his warps back into his flesh as he passed.
He knew, as she did, there was no time to waste.
They moved through the citadel, from one gigantic chamber to the next, growing increasingly exhausted and sullen. They barely spoke now, or even looked to gauge each other’s position. This was business now. For all their initial concerns they’d perhaps surprised themselves with their aptitude and their resilience, and whatever came their way they were ready for it.
Spot with his warps, Zaran with brief but devastating bursts of his shuriken crossbow, Mayhem with her poison. All protecting Bombshell as she sought the prime locations to set her explosives. They were professional, clinical. Determined.
This was them. This was who they were. The world might laugh at them, or underestimate them, or even overlook their existence entirely, but this was their time. And the devilhounds and the bats and the giant wolfspiders and the tentacles from the walls and the chains of flying, flaming skulls – anything that Pandemonia chose to dispatch against them – they were equal to it.
To tell any of them, before this day, that they’d be taking such horrors in their stride… well, they wouldn’t have believed it. But, in the end, none of it mattered. The specifics weren’t important: it was just one more wave of the bizarre or the nightmarish to eliminate as they steadily went about achieving their goal.
Pandemonia herself recognized the futility of it all. That was why, ultimately, she allowed her remaining demons to cower in the bottomless pits beneath the citadel whilst she strode forward to confront her adversaries herself.
It was, after all, the only way this could end.
“You understand I only need one of you alive,” Pandemonia hissed, as she faced the four fatigued individuals who now arrayed themselves before her. She wore her true form now, no cloak of womanly charms or seductive glamors, and when she pointed at the Spot it was with a fleshless finger emerging from ancient, fetid rags.
“You. You can guide me through the world between worlds you travel,” she whispered. “For this courtesy I will grant you your life and the lives of your companions, if you so wish. I can even heal the one who suffers through his demonic wounds.”
“We have a contract,” Spot replied. Bombshell glanced at him warily, then at Zaran. Neither man appeared interested in Pandemonia’s tender, her last offer in particular. Was it possible? Could the witch reverse Zaran’s injuries? Perhaps it was true, but there was no mention of whether Mayhem’s toxins would be purged into the bargain. It was trickery, then, verbal sleight-of-hand. The others were right not to negotiate, not that Spot seemed open to debate in any regard.
Bombshell bowed her head.
“Whoever has set this contract, they’re nothing compared to me,” Pandemonia seethed. “Free me from Sorcista and they will be my first victims. You’ll be free from obligation and fear of reprisal.”
“And the rest of the world thereafter?” Mayhem asked. “You were imprisoned for a reason. For preying on innocents as they slumbered, feasting on them like a cancer. You believe I’d consent to giving you freedom to return to your evil?”
“Evil? I smell blood on your dead hands, woman. Don’t presume to pronounce judgment on me.”
“I slaughter those who deserve it,” Mayhem hissed.
Pandemonia inclined her eyeless face, her slit mouth curling into a grin. “Well on that we truly are alike,” she snarled. And then she thrust out her hand and the emerald gloom rippled, causing Mayhem to shriek as the fluctuations passed over her and through her in invisible waves of pain. Mayhem fell from her lofty position, trailing green smoke like a wounded aircraft, and Zaran responded immediately by aiming the nose of his crossbow.
“As if there was any doubt,” he said, “then no deal.”
He jammed his finger on the bow trigger, unleashing a short burst of poisoned shuriken – but then the tail of the magazine flicked and fell clear, exhausted. The automatic release of the crossbow clack-clack-clacked on an empty chamber. Zaran cursed.
Up ahead, Pandemonia turned her back on the venom-laced silver stars and attempted to hurl herself clear, but the blades shredded her cloak and whatever constituted her flesh beneath, biting deep and causing her to wail. She staggered, feeling her body begin to smolder and melt. Another volley would have downed her, but with Zaran’s magazine running dry she was afforded one opportunity to retaliate, and she grasped it with a bellow of hatred.
Throughout the chamber where the final battle was occurring, the shadows shifted and coalesced into multiple forms. People. Women, men, children. The crowd pushed forward on all sides, dark eyes searching for their intended targets.
“I love you.”
“I want you.”
“I miss you.”
“Take me.”
“Be with me.”
“Please don’t leave me.”
“Mommy…?”
The true power of a succubus lay in the way they could delve into a person’s mind with intangible claws, separating brain compartments and sifting through memories, searching for a victim’s emotional weaknesses. Lust and desire were typical, as were regret and compassion. Pandemonia tapped into it all now, her finger like black needles in each of the four heads arrayed against her and dragging out what she required without bothering to be subtle.
These apparitions were lovers, family, friends. Alive or dead, close at heart or forever lost. It was a vicious onslaught and Bombshell seemed to suffer the most, especially when a small, blonde girl, no more than five years old, reached for her with open palms and a beaming, heartbreaking smile.
“I waited for you, mommy! I was good, I was. Don’t leave me again, mommy, please. It’s dark, mommy. Heaven’s nothing like you promised it would be. I want to come back. Can I come back now?”
The girl’s eyes glistened. There were tubes in her, just like in the hospital. Like the last time Wendy had seen her before she was gone and any light that had ever existed inside her had been snuffed like a candle, herself just a tender twenty-three years old. Two young for motherhood, everyone had said, especially with Wendy being such a wild child. But it had suited her, for the short while it had lasted. It had almost saved her.
Wendy slipped her hand into her pocket and found her grenade. The one with her daughter’s name scratched into the shell with the point of a knife. The one she’d been saving for so long now.
“It’s not real,” Spot said, striding forward with scimitar raised. Without hesitation he speared the small girl’s face with a blade already encrusted with the vile taint of demons’ blood. The girl screamed and writhed and faded in a wisp of fog.
Bombshell exhaled a mournful sound, a terrible cry that Spot knew he’d never forgot for as long as he lived – however short a time that might prove to be – and when the blonde turned upon him with wild eyes and mascara streaking black down her cheeks he believed that she was going to take him by the throat and never let go, not even when he was dead.
But instead she just shivered, her hands trembling as she released her grip on her grenade, specifically the firing pin.
“Get your detonator switch ready,” Spot said, quietly. Bombshell nodded, eyes burning.
Spot turned to Zaran. “Now,” he said.
Mayhem was struggling for the first time during their brief acquaintance, still downed by Pandemonia’s attack and now surrounded by vengeful apparitions. Those she’d lost when she’d been turned, maybe, or the victims of those who’d died through drugs or abuse, the ones she hadn’t been able to save. Deaths on her conscience even if she hadn’t known them in life. They were drowning her, and she didn’t seem able to fight back. Perhaps she didn’t want to. Spot felt sorry for her but there was no time to help her; he merely discounted her from the final play, meaning it was down to him and Zaran.
Pandemonia was tormented by the toxin in her system and, although it wasn’t enough to kill her outright, it had slowed her reactions. When Spot approached her and conjured a warp hole in the air before him she perceived him as the principal threat and redoubled her efforts against him.
This, however, was a mistake on two levels. Firstly, the succubus had already used Spot’s biggest regret against him and memories of Karen Halford in her red sweater and Christmas tinsel just weren’t going to cut it any more.
Secondly, Pandemonia had discounted Zaran. The Weapons Master, injured and ailing, wasn’t done inflicting pain; he now stepped through Spot’s warp brandishing an axe in his good right hand, the blade glistening with Mayhem’s venom and, with an instant meaty swing, he aimed for Pandemonia’s throat.
He wanted her head, severed clean…
…but, regrettably for him, it was all just a little too late.
His body was breaking down, his strength all but gone, his reflexes shot. Pandemonia shifted her weight sideways at the last possible moment and the blade cleaved thin air. Zaran stumbled, fell to one knee. Pandemonia reached out and stabbed him through the back of his skull with her claws, flexing her wrist and removing his brain and much of his scalp with a wet squelch. Zaran spasmed, eyes wide and jaw trembling. Then he fell, the axe tumbling from his hand.
Just like that. Done.
Spot roared and threw himself at his enemy, scimitar swinging, but Pandemonia wheeled towards him and, in desperation, hurled the only weapon at hand – Zaran’s brain – into Spot’s face. Spot grunted and spun sideways, his head snapping back on his neck as exploding cerebellum vanished into a scattering of dimensional apertures on the surface of his skin and then re-emerged at velocity from other warp holes, like magma erupting from a sequence of craters.
Spot collapsed, vomiting from a portal in the vague region of his mouth. Pandemonia closed in for the kill.
And that was when Bombshell stepped out of the same warp Zaran had materialized from, her high-heeled boots leaving imprints in his pooling blood. She forced herself not to look at the remains of her dead companion’s head as she stooped and collected a belt of daggers looped about his left shoulder blade, sliding three weapons from their individual sheathes, one after the other. She began to juggle them as Pandemonia turned towards her, making sure she gripped each one by the handle and not the venom-soaked blade as they passed from hand to hand in elegant semi-loops.
Pandemonia reached out but Bombshell sidestepped and flicked one of the daggers as it fell into her hand. Shuk. The blade embedded in the near side of Pandemonia’s face, up to the hilt. The succubus screamed and began to claw at herself as her demon flesh instantly began to hiss and smoke and blacken.
“For Zaran,” Wendy Conrad breathed, eyes glistening. “For everyone you’ve ever tortured in their dreams. And for my daughter.”
She flicked the second dagger, then the third. Immaculate grace, exquisite skill. Pandemonia received one to the chest and one to the gut, forming a perfect vertical line with the first. These poisoned blades stabbed deeper than the shuriken, and Bombshell’s superior speed and aim ensured that the succubus couldn’t protect herself with her cloak on this occasion.
She shrieked and shrieked. Her arms fell loose, her face crumpling, her upper torso collapsing in upon itself like a burst balloon. She melted. She fried. She turned black as the plague and then on, to rot and ash.
O, what a world.
All that was left of her when it was done, aside from the three daggers and a dozen glinting shuriken buried in the dusty remains of what she’d once been, was a small, blue sphere of softly glowing energy encased in a shell of nightmare skein. Bombshell bent and collected this, studying it with cold, dead eyes as it throbbed gently in her open palm.
You should ask the pretty blonde what added assignment she’s been charged with, once we’re inside Pandemonia’s citadel.
Mayhem’s earlier words. Bombshell breathed deeply then slipped the glowing ball into the pocket of her jacket. From that same pocket she retrieved her detonator, a compact device bastardized from the base unit of a cell phone. Her thumb hovered.
“Spot. Are you alive?”
The Spot rose groggily, rubbing the backs of his hands across his face. He could still feel pieces of Zaran’s brain floating in his skin, staining the interior emptiness of the Between. He couldn’t help but wonder how much of Mayhem’s venom was in there too.
“Spot.”
“I’m okay. I’m fine. I can guide us. Mayhem…?”
“I can’t see her.”
“We can’t just--”
“Yes, we can. It’s… what she wanted.”
Promise me, Wendy, that when you press down on your little red button… allow me to savor the moment too, yes?
“She wants to know if she can die,” Bombshell breathed. “We go now, Spot. Understand?”
The Spot sighed, then created a new warp in mid-air. Bombshell stepped forward, tapping out an ignition sequence on her detonator as she passed into the portal. At the last moment, as Spot followed her through, she pressed the final button and cast the device away. And, as Spot’s warp shimmered and they vanished, so the numerous explosives that had been set throughout the citadel triggered and exploded with a cacophonous roar, shattering black stone and dislodging walls and foundations, and unleashing clouds of Mayhem’s poison gas into the very substance of the demonic pocket realm that Pandemonia had inhabited.
And the citadel fell.
“I must congratulate you, Ms. Poppyfield. Your team exceeded expectations.”
The countenance of Victor Von Doom was addressing his audience via a three-dimensional holographic image, projected from a nondescript device the size and shape of an oyster shell. The device was placed in the middle of the same table in the Cynthia’s Rest Inn where Spot and Bombshell had sat the previous evening. They sat here again now, Bombshell once again smoking cigarettes and stubbing black circles into the wood and Spot gazing out of a narrow window at the bleak Latverian landscape.
On this occasion, however, there was no Mayhem languishing by the open hearth in her smoldering cloak and no Zaran descending the rustic staircase laden with weapons. In their stead, the bespectacled brunette Ms. Poppyfield stood in the middle of the room, demure and understated as ever.
“Payment shall be deposited in the relevant accounts, and with that this matter is concluded,” the voice of Doom stated. “I hope we have cause to do business again some day.”
And with that he was done, the hologram blinking out of existence.
So simple. So…trivial.
There was silence in the tavern, broken only by the crackle and spit of logs in the hearth and the rattling of the windows in their ancient frames as a bitter wind cavorted through the dusk. Bombshell smoked her latest cigarette, her blue eyes glazed. She’d aged this past day, her skin drawn. Spot sat quiet and still in his chair, the black holes of his eyes eerie and swollen.
“Doesn’t waste his time does he, our friend Doom?” Spot murmured eventually. “Very professional. No personal thanks for us, then? The ones who risked our lives? No I’m sorry about your friends, how very unfortunate, toodle-pip?”
“Just statistics,” Bombshell muttered. “That’s just how a guy like Doom rolls, right? How many of us came back alive was never a consideration.”
“You still think he’s one of the classics?”
“Classic asshole.”
“Absolutely.”
Poppyfield regarded the pair of them with a flicker of amusement. “Intriguing to hear you refer to them as friends,” she said. “These individuals you met just two days ago, who you barely knew. The obligatory camaraderie of soldiers, yes?”
“Zaran was worth one hundred Dooms,” Bombshell said, evenly. “And even more of you.”
“Ah. But I’m just a humble broker, Miss Conrad…”
Bombshell inclined her head, flicking away her cigarette and then reaching inside her jacket. “Really?” she murmured. “I’m thinking not, actually. I’m thinking Mayhem was right about you.”
She withdrew the small sphere of blue energy she’d taken from Pandemonia’s remains and spun it on the tips of her nimble fingers. The colors within swirled and flashed. Ms. Poppyfield’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacles.
“The specifics in my contract stated I was to, and I quote, procure this bauble at all costs,” Bombshell declared, glancing at Spot. “That’s what Mayhem saw when she went prying in my bag, remember? My added assignment. She didn’t care, really. She wasn’t there for Doom’s benefit, or to get paid. It wasn’t even about killing Pandemonia for her. She wanted to know if she could die. A second time.”
“That’s why you didn’t care about leaving her behind?” Spot asked.
Bombshell shrugged. “As I said, it was what she wanted,” she said, spinning the blue sphere once more. “But, anyway, it occurred to me, reading the contract and then thinking things through as we went about our business…what was this little trinket, and why was it more important than eliminating Pandemonia, our supposed mission?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Poppyfield said, smiling coldly.
“No, you’re probably right there. It’s magic stuff. And, let me tell you, I’m sick to the back teeth of magic. But I suspected that the bauble was for your benefit and not Doom’s, something which he just confirmed by not even asking about it.”
“And, following that logic, that means it’s been you all along. You went to Doom and proposed a way to destroy his blot on the landscape, not the other way around. You told him that, for a sum of money, you could hire a bunch of goons to get the job done and he wouldn’t have to worry himself about it. Doom could have found a way to destroy Pandemonia himself eventually, but he saw the profit in this deal and agreed. You then tracked us down under your own steam, none of this rubbish about the man who hired me has his methods. It was you. You decided who you wanted, you recruited us, you gave us our roles and responsibilities. My job was to procure this. For you...not Doom.”
Spot glanced across at Poppyfield and shivered. Nothing about her had…changed exactly, but she suddenly wasn’t as demure and innocuous as she’d always appeared before.
“Doom will have this place wired, won’t he?” Spot asked. “Paranoid bloke like him. He’ll be listening in to this conversation, sending his Doom-o-nauts or whatever they’re called to exterminate us.”
“The walls have ears, Mr. Ohnn?” Ms. Poppyfield said, her smile widening.
Bombshell sniffed. “Magic again,” she muttered. “You’ve pulled the wool over Doom’s eyes this long and this effectively you’re not going to be undone by technology. Even with someone as powerful and capable as Doom, someone who understands magic, there are ways to remain invisible in his shadow. After all, for all he is, he’s still only human. Not like you.”
“Oh, you clever girl,” Poppyfield purred. “So much brighter than you look. Have you worked me out, then?”
“As I’ve said before, I’m a fan. You classics, you fascinate me. Doom, The Red Skull, Madame Hydra…and then there’s you. The Enchantress.”
Ms. Poppyfield arched an eyebrow and then flourished a lazy hand, unraveling the glamour she’d placed about herself from the very start, revealing the true woman disguised beneath. It looked so simple, like the sloughing of a magical skin, but of course it wasn’t. It was a complex illusion, perfect in every way. It had needed to be to fool Doom.
Amora the Enchantress stretched her long legs in their black stockings, and the green circles that decorated them from toe to upper thigh seemed to dance beguilingly in response. She shifted her hips and her green and gold half-skirt glittered and swished. Her honey-gold hair gleamed like milk and sunlight. Spot cleared his throat. Bombshell lit another cigarette.
“What is it?” she asked, quietly. “This…orb. Is there some way you can explain it, just so we know what the others died for?”
Amora weaved a finger absently and the smoke Bombshell exhaled drifted in the shape of kisses and the color of blood. “All magic comes from a source, even Asgardian magic,” she breathed, her green eyes utterly mesmerizing. “The source isn’t infinite. Any well I can tap for my own benefit is to be valued, especially if I don’t have to risk myself to obtain it.”
“Pandemonia was a hoarder. She was readying herself for the next time she gained her freedom, and there would have been a next time if I hadn’t acted first. If it’s any consolation, she would have been a credible threat to your world if she’d had the opportunity. In a way, you’re…heroes. You saved Midgard, your precious Earth, before that threat occurred. I merely saw a chance to gain something I wanted: a pleasant little dose of pure magic.”
“You haven’t got it yet,” Spot pointed out.
Bombshell barked a bitter laugh. “Come on, Speck,” she murmured. “You don’t think she could kill us where we sit any time she wanted? She’s playing with us. She’d just have to wiggle her toes in our direction or blow us a kiss. This isn’t our league. We’re just pawns.”
“But--”
“You know what you are, Johnny?” Bombshell said, sadly. “You’re a romantic. Something in you believes in happy endings, in victories for the little people. You signed up for this because you thought that if you succeeded then suddenly you’d matter. That the world would look around and nod and give you a respectful smile and say, hey, you know what? The Spot? He proved himself. He’s not just some C-list nobody who’ll turn up dead in a warehouse on the docks one day, just because the Punisher caught him in his crosshairs or something equally undignified. The Spot, he’s A-list. He’s big time. He took on a demon witch and put her down.
“No one’s going to say that, Johnny. No one’s going to talk about us. I hand this bauble over or I don’t, the result’s the same. This is the end. We drift away and become nobodies again, and everyone will forget we ever happened, even the Enchantress here…you think she’ll remember us? Honor us? Please. As soon as she’s gone from here, her little magic pep in hand, she’ll erase us from her head on purpose, just so she doesn’t have to think about us.
“That’s the way this works, Johnny. No happy endings. Not for people like us. Not ever.”
Bombshell closed her eyes. Amora shook her head wearily and held out her hand. Bombshell breathed deeply. Then she glanced at Spot through her fringe and smiled, tears glistening on her cheeks.
“Maybe you should head on to Reykjavik,” she said, slowly. “Because…I’m planning on spending some time with my daughter. Okay?”
Spot frowned. But then his black eyes widened. Slowly he placed the flat of his hand on the table and allowed a warp hole to begin to grow beneath it.
The Enchantress tapped her foot. Bombshell breathed again, then nodded.
Why do you smoke, mommy?
Because I’m hot stuff, honey. Tick, tick, boom.
She held out her hand and Amora snatched what was being offered. But it wasn’t the blue sphere, now tucked away in Bombshell’s sleeve. It was something else.
“Never trust a juggler,” Wendy Conrad said, sadly. “Quick fingers, quicker mind, isn’t that what you said?”
She spun the pin she’d just pulled from her grenade, making it travel across her knuckles like a coin. Amora had a moment to register what she was holding and her green eyes flew wide.
And then the grenade with the name scratched into the outer shell detonated, taking most of the Cynthia’s Rest Inn with it.
The Spot emerged from his warp in Reykjavik at high velocity and crashed into a wall with a grunt. He fancied he could hear the explosion in Latveria ringing in his ears, although in truth he’d escaped in the half-second before detonation, otherwise he wouldn’t have lived through the blast.
He sat for a while, gasping.
It was, he thought sagely, probably impossible to kill an Asgardian goddess with a hand grenade. But he doubted that Amora would have enjoyed the experience. And, anyway, that wasn’t the point.
For Wendy Conrad, in a world where there were no happy endings, that was about as close as she was ever going to get.
Jonathan Ohnn closed his eyes and slumped, thoroughly depressed.
Then he remembered his bank account.
And, a short while later, he allowed himself a tearful smile.
In the ruins of the citadel at the summit of Mount Sorcista, no longer the prison of demons but now a graveyard of scorched stone and ash, something stirred. Green smoke curled from gaps in the rubble like snakes, weaving in the sunlight before drifting away on the wind. The blackened stone trembled. There was subsidence, small trickles at first but growing larger. Birds wheeled overhead, black flecks against the blue sky.
Movement ceased, and the smoke faded. Sorcista held its breath.
And then a hand emerged, pushing up for freedom, ghastly green skin and long, hooked fingers tipped with claws that glistened with poison.
Undead, but surviving still.
Wendy Conrad’s daughter’s name, the name scratched into the shell of the grenade she’d carried with her all these years, was Stacy.
If you like, you can imagine that she was delighted to see her mother when they were reunited, and that Maximilian Zaran was also there, no longer encumbered with swords and crossbow and throwing stars but now free to enjoy whatever came next. And you can imagine that Brigid O’Reilly was happy that not even plastique explosives and demonic fallout could destroy the creature she now was, and that she was content to persist with her vigilante war against those who earned money from the misery of others. And you can imagine that Jonathan Ohnn was allowed to enjoy his newfound wealth and didn’t take long to get his groove back, and that in time to come people would learn of the job he’d pulled in darkest Latveria and would think of him with respect.
I guess it all depends on how much you believe in happy endings.
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The End...
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