Calypso Slaves - Ghost Story

The car was a car, but the speed limits were pretty low here in town and it was usually pretty easy to figure out where they were going. Echoshire might not be one of Cassie's usual stomping grounds, but she still knew her way around pretty well, so it wasn't hard to find shortcuts. Still, Cassie couldn't help but wonder if the car was a little too easy to follow and her fears were confirmed when she rounded a corner into an alley and got shoved from behind. Cassie fell onto her stomach, rolled onto her back, and there was already a shotgun pointed at her face by a police officer.

"On your stomach with your hands on your head!" he shouted. Cassie had no idea what would happen if she complied, shipped back to the Calypso? Sold somewhere else? Executed? But she knew what would happen if she didn't, so she obeyed, looking around for some way out while she rolled back onto her stomach and placed her hands behind her head. All she could see was the Majestic Thirteen car parked at the curb on the other side of the alley.

The driver agent, dressed in a dark suit with dark glasses, the faintest glint of the data projected onto their lenses visible from this side, walked over to Cassie. "Thank you for your assistance, Officer Baker," the agent said, as the officer pulled Cassie's hands into cuffs and dragged her onto her knees. "Miss Heart," the agent said, "I rather thought we'd seen the last of you. Perhaps more drastic measures are needed to cease your meddling."

"We have a common enemy right now," Cassie said, "there's no reason for us to be fighting." The agent shook her down, took her weapon, then grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to her feet and towards the car. The police officer wasn't following, so Cassie whispered to the agent "I'm here to get rid of the poltergeist in the high school. You don't want it here anymore than I do."

The agent tossed Cassie's backpack into the trunk of the car, shoved her into the backseat, climbed in next to her, and then slammed the door shut. The second Majestic agent was sitting in the front seat. "Return home," the agent next to Cassie said, and the car started into motion.

They rode in silence for several minutes. "You don't have anything to lose by letting me help," Cassie said, "the only enemy we don't have in common is each other." The agent still didn't respond. He probably wouldn't respond to anything, no matter what it was, until they got to wherever they were going. Which was hopefully not a quiet spot for an execution. Either way, Cassie knew that if she kept talking all she'd do is risk giving something away, so she waited in silence.

The car arrived at a garage, the doors came down, and the agents pulled Cassie out of the car and into a small house, where they sat her down in a chair in the kitchen. One agent zip tied her ankles to the chair's legs and then uncuffed and re-cuffed her hands behind the back of the chair, while the other leaned against the counter and stared at her. They were silent for close to a full minute. "You've been a lot of trouble, Miss Heart," the agent said, finally.

"Like I said, today I'm actually doing you a favor," Cassie said.

"Tell me everything you know about the poltergeist," the agent said.

"If you let me out of these cuffs and zip ties, I will gladly work with you to solve this thing," Cassie said, "but I'm not just going to tell you everything so you can shoot me and walk away."

The agent nodded to his companion, who opened up a cupboard and pulled out a car battery and a pair of jumpers. "Tell me what you know about the poltergeist," he said.

"You know torture doesn't actually work? They did studies," Cassie said, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. The other agent pulled her shirt up over her head, it was caught between her arms and the back of the chair. He hooked up the jumpers to Cassie's nipples, cold steel digging painfully into her. "Try me," she said, and a current coursed through her body, pain screaming through every nerve. Cassie moaned with pain, but she kept her mouth shut.

"Tell me what you know about the poltergeist," the Majestic agent said again, and Cassie decided she was just going to tune him out. Nothing she said would make them stop, and when they did stop it would probably be to shoot her. Pain shot through her body again and she whimpered, tugging against her restraints even though she knew it wouldn't do anything. The agent was talking, Cassie already knew what he was saying and she didn't care anyway. She looked around for a way out, trying to be surreptitious about it. She didn't want to take another jolt from that battery, but mostly she didn't want to die here. Not when Toluca County was still in danger because of the can of worms she'd helped open. "I don't deserve to die," she whispered, and then her nerves were alive with pain again, and this time she screamed.

There was a set of kitchen knives on the counter. Cassie tugged on the chair, dragging it to the side bit by bit, and did her best to act like she was trying to get away from the battery. She hardly ever used her mesmer powers, but they were always there, a constant electric hum around everything, the fields that bound atoms together, a background noise she usually forgot about. But the electromagnetics that Cassie could, in theory, use to read minds were also the force that bound all matter together, and every atom of reality could be manipulated with it. She tugged on those fields with her mind, pulling the knives out and towards one of the agents, who raised a hand up and halted them mid-air with his own mesmer powers.

Of course they'd have genen on their team, Cassie thought, it made the interrogation go faster. Lucky that she never really gave any thought to the question he kept asking. Another jolt of electricity ripped through her nerves and now she was screaming in pain. The punishments on the Calypso were bad enough, but they happened and then they were over. That this might be the last thing Cassie would ever feel filled her with a desperate horror.

The electricity coursed through her again, and she could hear the agent speaking, still repeating the exact same question. She could also hear the door splintering open, though, and that got the attention of the agents. One nodded at the other, who then went to investigate, drawing his sidearm. The one who stayed behind turned to Cassie and asked again "tell me everything you know about the poltergeist."

When Cassie said nothing, he flooded her with pain again, Cassie sobbed and struggled against the cuffs, and she could hear gunshots. "In here!" she shouted, "I'm in here!" She had no idea who broke down the door or whether or not they got shot to death, but she couldn't bear the thought that they weren't here to save her. She screamed in pain from another jolt from the battery.

A paper bag was tossed from around the corner, sliding across the floor, and with a hissing noise it erupted into a bright white light. Cassie closed her eyes and looked away, her eyes seared by the flash, and heard more gunshots. The hissing stopped, and she opened her eyes. Around the edges of the afterimage, she could see the Majestic agent dead, blood pooling out of a hole punched through his head. Cassie felt nauseous, although her mind having been frayed by the battery jolts probably wasn't helping.

Jack stepped into view, dark-haired and pale-skinned, marked by the same magic as Cassie. He checked a corner, then backed towards Cassie with one hand still on his gun and released her nipples from the cable jumpers. Cassie moaned with renewed agony as he removed one, then the other, and tugged her shirt back down. He took a final look around before kneeling down next to Cassie and pulling out a knife with his spare hand, cutting the ties, and then helping her get her cuffed hands off the chair. "How are you for walking?" he asked, setting her back down on the chair with her hands on the same side of the backrest as the rest of her and giving her a kiss on the forehead.

"I just...I need a minute," Cassie said, "I'll be fine in a bit."

Jack searched the bodies and found the keys to Cassie's cuffs. "How did you find me?" Cassie asked.

"Amber called me. I found you halfway through your chase and followed you from there," Jack said as he released Cassie's wrists from the tight, cold embrace of the cuffs. She rubbed her wrists and sighed with relief. "Are you alright," he asked, offering a hand to help her up.

"Mostly," Cassie said, taking his hand and standing up from the chair. She'd had some practice muscling through pain lately, but the car jumpers were worse than anything she'd had so far.

"Let's go," Jack said, "if they have more agents nearby they could show up any second, and if they know there's danger they'll probably bring a SWAT team."

"They could have intel here," Cassie said, looking around at the house. It was pretty tiny. Kitchen, living room, couple of bedrooms. It wouldn't take long to search. "They don't have any more agents in Echoshire, anyway, not according to my intel."

"How good's your intel?" Jack asked.

"It's been pretty good so far, but I guess not perfect," Cassie said. "It'll only take a few minutes to search the house, you can leave early if you want," Cassie said, "I'll get in touch with you through Neil."

"It'll go faster together," Jack said, "I'll search in here and get the car ready, you search the bedrooms," he pulled out his phone, "I'm setting this for five minutes, when it goes off I'm yelling for you and we're leaving immediately."

"Okay," Cassie said, nodded, and ran through the living room and into a bedroom. She grabbed a pillow, yanked off the case, and shoved a tablet inside, then began tearing apart desk drawers. A few loose pieces of paper had notes scribbled on them, probably supernatural, so she shoved those in, then went through the drawers, pulling out the clothes, but found nothing hiding underneath them. A search of the closet turned up nothing but a few cards shoved into a spare pair of pants, probably for a coffee shop or something, but Cassie grabbed them without wasting time to examine them.

She conducted a similar search of the other room, snagging the tablet, a few more scraps of paper, and a spare wallet, and then started checking the desk drawers for fake bottoms. She found one in one of the side drawers, popping it out to find a small black book. "Think I know what this is," she said, and shoved it in the pillow sack with the others.

"Cassie, let's go!" Jack shouted from outside, and she ran from the room and into the garage. The garage door was already open. The wiring in the dashboard had been ripped out and tampered with. Cassie jumped into the backseat, Jack was already waiting in the front, and as soon as she was halfway in the door, he peeled out into the driveway on manual and then started driving, trying to stay casual, towards the center of town.

"They've probably got a GPS on this thing," Cassie said.

"It's just to get us away from the house," Jack said, "once we have some distance we'll just pull over and leg it." They passed a police car headed to the house with sirens on a few blocks out. If Majestic Thirteen was tracking them, they weren't in direct communication with the officers. Even so, Jack pulled over a block after, having transferred all their stolen intel from the sack to Cassie's backpack, and they legged it a few more blocks until they found a roadside cafe near the admin district.

After scanning the crowd, or rather the lack thereof, Jack said "I think it's good. Let's get a coffee or something. Where've you been?"

Cassie could lie to him like she'd lied to Amber, Neil, and Lionel. There was no excuse to be made for keeping Jack safe, he was already neck deep in the occult, but Cassie didn't know if she could trust him. She knew that some kind of cult was most likely responsible for completing the Hellmouth, and Jack might be a part of it. He had recruited both Cassie and Jeanette. He had always pushed the group to uncover more occult lore. "You know people have been disappearing since we opened that connection to Naraka?" Cassie asked, punching an order into the auto-vendor.

"Yeah," Jack said, "you didn't answer my question, though."

"Did you know we'd be letting an army of murderers into Toluca when we opened it?" Cassie asked.

"I...Not exactly," Jack said. "We both knew that there were horrible demons out there. Neither of us knew so many would come through so quickly."

"I...I'm not saying I blame you," Cassie said.

"No, you didn't say that," Jack said, "until just now."

And Cassie knew, now that her head had caught up with her heart, that while she might not have been blaming Jack, she was hoping he'd say something that would put him to blame instead of her. And that was not who Cassie wanted to be. "Jeanette was a spy for Majestic Thirteen," Cassie said, "she would've done anything to stop that ritual from completing. So someone else completed it instead of her. And from the rate of disappearances, the demons knew there'd be a gate open. The little ones started coming through as soon as there was a crack, it didn't take any time at all for word to get around. There's a cult in Toluca, and they knew when we were completing the Hellmouth. If Jeanette works for Majestic Thirteen and I know I'm not part of a cult, then..."

"Where is all this information coming from?" Jack asked.

"I have...An employer," Cassie said, "his information has all been correct so far."

"And by an employer you mean an owner?" Jack asked.

Cassie turned the question over in her head. But even though she couldn't trust Jack, she didn't know he was an enemy, either. She might keep some secrets from him, but she wouldn't lie to him. "Yes," she said, "an owner. Someone with a vested interest in keeping Toluca in one piece bought me."

"Cassie, did they...Did they hurt you?" Jack asked.

"No," Cassie said. Sure, she didn't want to lie, but this was for Jack's benefit. She didn't want him worrying. "I'm fine. It's not that different from the Lockhearts, really. Except for the part where I get chased by ghosts. And anyways. You're dodging the subject. How do I know you're not part of the cult?"

"Cassie, we were not that careful covering our tracks on this," Jack said, "we pretty much let every occultist within three counties of here know we were up to something. We knew they wouldn't report us to the police."

"We got most of them arrested for being shitty people," Cassie said. She could still remember the filthy, bloodstained mattress with a pair of shackles attached to it she'd found in one of the houses she'd visited, an occultist she was setting up a trade with for the Encyclopedia not long before her arrest. The shackles were child-sized.

"Not all of them," Jack said, "and not immediately. If there's a cult nearby they must've thought it was fucking Christmas when other occultists showed up. Give us the right information and we'd be cats' paws to open up a connection to Naraka for them."

"Or maybe they were more straightforward about it," Cassie said.

"What do you want me to do, swear a blood oath?" Jack asked.

"I...I'm sorry, Jack. I mean, I don't know you're not in the cult, but I don't know you are either and I shouldn't be grilling you like this," Cassie said. "I...I just wanted someone to blame. Other than myself."

"Cassie, this was an accident. It's not your fault," Jack said.

"Yes it is!" Cassie said, "we knew Naraka could be dangerous, we knew they've done terrible things to their enemies, and we damn well knew that the last interaction they had with humanity was as mortal enemies! And-and I'm not saying you should feel bad about it, Jack, I'm not your priest, but I knew something like this was possible every moment I worked to get the Hellmouth open, and now it's open and I can't pretend this was some unforeseeable tragedy. It's...It's my fault these people are dying."

"Maybe a little," Jack said, "and yeah, I do feel kinda bad about all this. But if your numbers on the disappearances are accurate and there is a cult here, we were manipulated into this. And we're here fixing it, aren't we?"

"I guess," Cassie said.

"Let's focus on solving this," Jack said, nodding his head towards Cassie's pack, "what've we got from the Majestic safehouse?"

Cassie took a deep breath and dug around her pack for what she'd recovered. "These," she said, spreading the slightly crinkled papers out onto a patio table. "Looks like...otherworld openings."

"That'll get you into Mictlan," Jack said.

"I still have the Encyclopedia Mortuis," Cassie said, "could've gotten into Mictlan on my own. But they've got Naraka entrances, too."

"You planning on visiting Naraka?" Jack asked.

"No, but from the other side they're Naraka exits, which could be extremely fucking handy," Cassie said. "Plus, Annwyn. In case I ever want to vacation in Annwyn." It's definitely the least fucked up otherworld, so that wasn't even entirely a joke. "Lots of notes on the poltergeist, too. Mostly stuff I've already got. Did the scoobies fill you in?"

"Yeah," Jack said, "although I'm not sure how distorted the information I got was. Amber's convinced you're working for M13."

"Well, the poltergeist is the result of a bunch of mysterious disappearances, they mostly show up as disembodied shadows," Cassie said, "and Majestic Thirteen knew it." With a breath, she pulled the book out of her pack, "I've been putting this off, but...There's this thing, too. This book has wound up in the possession of multiple victims of the mysterious disappearances at the school. Neil wasn't able to trace it to all of them, but that's probably just because most people wouldn't open up. Plus, some of the victims might not have had anyone paying close enough attention to notice what they were doing, even if it was unusual."

"Do we know anything else about it?" Jack asked.

"Just that people who read it usually end up disappearing," Cassie said. Jack put a hand out to take the first look. "Make sure I don't disappear," Cassie said, and opened it up. The first page was a standard craft shop diary "property of ______" on an otherwise blank page. A name had been written on the inside of the page, once, but now the surface of the page had been torn off where the writing once was. Around the edges of the tear Cassie could see the corners of a rectangular box drawn around the edge and completely filled in. Looks like whoever owned this diary had second thoughts about identifying themselves, and took at least two separate attempts at disguising their identity.

They hadn't ripped out any of the pages behind, though, so with a bit of careful examination Cassie could make out the imprint on them left behind by the pen pressing through from the page above. "Ann...Annette Alv-" Cassie stopped for a moment. "Alvarez. The girl who was pushed off the school."

She skimmed through the first few dozen pages of the diary, and it was a perfectly normal schoolgirl's banal daily struggles. She brooded about her friends. She wrote naive fantasies about eternal romance with her fifteen-year old crush. She raged about how unfair her parents were and failed to articulate a point even when she had one. She helpfully dated all of the entries.

The closest thing to something unusual was that she seemed preoccupied with death and constantly worried about not having enough time to see all the fantastic places of the galaxy, particularly what with luminal delays and all. At one point about four full pages were dedicated to charts and lists of pros and cons of seeing various locations and the time it would take to reach them, all made with the atrociously optimistic assumption that the Toluca government would grant her an indefinite travel visa so she could leave the planet and never return by the time she's twenty-five. Plutocrats don't usually release their grip on courtiers so easily, but being fair to Annette, the extent of the control of the plutocracy over county and national governments isn't common knowledge. On the other hand, Annette didn't seem to be aware of how relativity worked and how short the trip would seem from the perspective of the travelers.