Renee Williams was a long, thin woman, the type who would look equally at home in a one room schoolhouse or a witch's cottage. She knew that, and deliberately set about concealing it via a variety of methods. Her clothes were those of a modern American executive, expensive and conservative in cut. She wore subtle and tasteful makeup, neither schoolmarms nor witches had a reputation for cosmetics. She wore her hair down and kept it long, straight, and carefully groomed. Her teeth, which had been dismayingly cavity prone, had been cosmetically capped years ago. She subtly accentuated her slim figure with carefully chosen shoes and undergarments.
She did all this, in part, to avoid both stereotypes. She was the headmistress of an exclusive girls' school, not the schoolmarm of some backwater schoolhouse or a con artist taking advantage of superstitious peasants. She had two PhDs, five Master’s degrees, and more certifications than she was consciously aware of. Atop all that, she had a security clearance normally associated with working at government agencies with letters for names.
That last cost the school a fair amount of money to maintain, but it was needed; Renee had four hundred young women under her care, any one of whom might be a target of terrorists, spies, or angry estranged parents with more resources than some small countries. In at least one case, the estranged parent in question was the leader of a small country; his wife had claimed asylum in the States and chosen Van Buren at least as much for the security precautions as the curriculum.
Ms. Williams worked hard to avoid looking like a schoolmarm, but there were times when she let reality show through. Specifically, when she suspected someone had failed her, but she didn't know how or why, the appearance of a figure embedded in the subconscious came in handy. Her subordinates, even the ones she knew were combat veterans, would begin stammering apologies and explanations after a few minutes’ exposure to her glower.
Unfortunately, Bel Stewart wasn't typical, even for the staff of Martin Van Buren High School. Physically, he was nearly her opposite. Where she was tall for a woman, and appeared even taller because of her thin build, he was of average height, and appeared a little short, like a fireplug. Where Renee adopted a serious mien on all occasions, displaying emotion as a carefully employed tool, Bel typically wore a smile; Renee had only seen him frown once, and that was when a teacher had failed to follow his security guidelines.
She frowned at him now, and as usual it had as much effect as the sun on a glacier. His expressive face showed concern, but no guilt. His hands danced across the keyboard of his laptop, which he then spun about to face her across her desk. His soft South African accent worked to soothe her nerves even as his words brought her more confusion and concern.
"We've got positive locations on all students except Artemis Drake and Gwendolyn MacAdams. For Artemis, we've got confirmation from Lazar that she was outside the ventilation intake right before the incident. In the case of Ms. MacAdams, we're less certain. She called in roughly an hour before, saying she would be late, but no one spotted her on campus until midway through the incident."
"How is Gwen?"
"Our resident genius is in hospital. Roberts is down there now checking on Josephs. I told him to bring back a précis on each of the girls there as well."
"What's the outlook on Mr. Josephs?"
"He'll live. That's a minor miracle. When I spoke with Harold, they were still talking about whether they'd be able to reattach his arm. If they can, I'm reconsidering my stance on religion."
"If they can't, do we pension him or keep him on?"
If her brusque assessment of a man she knew was an old friend of Bel's upset him, it didn't show. His expression just turned thoughtful, considering.
"I'll have to ask him. I'll watch him, too. He's a good man. I don't want to lose him, especially with whatever this was still up in the air."
The oblique reference to the unknown nature of the attack brought another level of ferocity to Renee's glower. She was furious that anyone would attack her school, and even more furious that her team of security personnel had been powerless to stop it. She opened her mouth to interrogate Bel further about that but was interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Come!"
If he were in a military uniform, the young man walking through the door could have stepped off a recruiting poster for any armed force in the world. Lean, conditioned, clean cut, and just over six feet in height, Harold Roberts had the shortest resume of any of Van Buren High's security staff, but that was offset by Bel Stewart's declaration of absolute confidence in him.
That confidence extended to Harold's professionalism; if it didn't, Renee wouldn't let him within a mile of her students. Renee had used him more than once to distract the student body while she observed them. When he was in the room, no one else got the students' full attention. In his gym sweats, he looked barely out of High School himself. What made it even worse was the way he moved. Just the walk from the door to Bel's side showcased the panther-like grace of a hunting predator.
It was clear he was hunting, too. While he tried to match his friend and mentor's unswervingly positive demeanor, he lacked the experience to maintain it in this situation. His brows were drawn down, his lips thin and flat. He handed Bel a thumb drive, then stepped back half a pace. Renee suppressed a highly inappropriate grin as she realized he was suppressing the instinct to salute.
"They're attempting to reattach his arm now. She needed quite a few stitches, but all the damage was superficial. All the others are fine. I've asked the nurses to call as soon as they know more. I made sure they have the school's number and your extension."
"Thanks, Harold. Did Josephs wake up?"
"No. The doctors say he'll be under until they're done all the surgery. One way or the other, he'll survive, thanks to his protégé and that girl with the tourniquet."
Renee preempted her security chief's next statement, "we'll need to bring in someone to do maintenance while he recovers. Bel, do you have anyone?"
"No one chomping at the bit, but I can find someone. Will they need to teach his class?"
"I'd rather not. Do you think the Lake girl can fill in for him until he gets back on his feet?"
"I have no idea. Not my area of expertise."
"Let me know if anyone on your replacement list can teach basic mechanics. If whoever we pick is qualified, we'll have them sub for Mr. Josephs. If not, I'll talk to her."
"Sounds like a plan. Anything else?"
"Yes. We're going to have to talk about the elephant in the room."
"It's large, grey, mammalian, and apparently invisible."
"You know what I meant. What happened?"
"Honestly, we're not sure at this point. Our best guess is a hallucinogen dispersed about the campus by some form of explosive device, followed up by an assault using attack dogs."
"What the hell would they be trying to accomplish?"
"Not sure, and that's what worries me. They might have inserted someone during the attack. They might have been assaying our responses. They might have been trying to get press coverage on MVB. They might be doing something else entirely that I haven't thought of."
The thought of uncontrolled press coverage on MVB sent a trickle of ice water down Renee's spine. "About the press; what's the response so far?"
"The local stations have picked up on the attack. The national coverage will be fed by them, rather than them being driven by it, so long as we keep it under control. What do you want to tell them?"
"Keep it simple but believable; an attack dog got loose on the grounds and savaged a student and teacher. A student drove it off. Withhold her name, Lane's mother isn't one of our imminent danger cases, but she is an immigrant."
"I'll brief Jesse on what she should tell them. What if they press?"
"Give them a hero. Lane looks suitably heroic. Do you think Artemis was involved?"
If the sudden subject changes threw him off his stride any more than her glower, Bel wasn't showing it. Renee congratulated himself again on finding him and offering him a position. From his perspective, it was a sinecure. From hers, she gained an experienced mercenary to run her security. Some would say it was overkill, but they both agreed completely on one thing. He'd summed it up with a quote; 'there is no overkill, there is only open fire and pass the ammunition.'
His answer this time, however, was slow in coming. Renee knew he'd been considering this very question, but his pause was his way of letting her know he had.
"I don't know. Indulge me, I want to spell this out for you and Harold, get your feedback. I tend to think if she were, we wouldn't be discussing it. Her exfiltration was extremely well executed. If we weren't professionally paranoid, Lazar would never have intercepted her. From what I can tell, if she were involved, it wasn't 'involved' so much as 'responsible'."
"How so?"
"Harold?"
Harold's self-deprecating grin made Renee reconsider her decision to hire him for the millionth time. What made it worse was that he didn't seem aware that he was doing it.
"As Bel tells me, young people lack planning skills. Her execution was perfect, but her planning was bad. If someone more experienced was involved, they would have given her a better plan to execute. Ergo, if she was involved, she was the planner."
"Are we safe assuming no one her age could be a planner?"
"Maybe, but she's very good. We had to track her by where our visibility wasn't. She went through vents a snake would get stuck in. She was ready for Ms. Lazar when she walked around the corner. Anyone who can do all that on demand isn't going to listen to someone her own age very well."
"That sounds like experience talking."
"It might be."
"OK, so either she's completely innocent or she's our culprit. What was she doing outside?"
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
"According to Lazar, she was sneaking a smoke. Lazar swapped her one of her herbal sticks. Harold found it lying on the ground, un-smoked. I find it hard to believe Artemis was cutting for no reason whatsoever. She wasn't carrying anything else that Lazar saw. Basically, my problem with her being involved is that anything actually happened."
A raised eyebrow asked Bel to elaborate.
"Her exfiltration had all the signs of someone showing off. The attack hit us completely by surprise, and other than the hallucinations there was nothing showy about it."
"That's a pretty big thing to discount."
"That's why I'm not sure. My recommendation is that we keep an eye on her. If she was responsible, she'll try again. If she wasn't involved, she won't go missing next time."
"Make it happen. What about the, what was it, knight in shining armor?"
"That's why we're doing a headcount before the girls leave and a full sweep of the school tonight. It sounds to me like a reaction to the hallucinogen, flash bangs, and someone in body armor."
"Let me know as soon as we get any information on where the dogs came from. Local police and animal control may be able to help us identify them."
Even looking uncomfortable, Harold was annoyingly enticing. He cleared his throat to be sure he had both their attention, then delivered his bombshell.
"There weren't any dogs. The tracks were some kind of long-clawed bear. There were no corpses or blood trails anywhere on school grounds."
"No dogs? No attack animals? Then what the hell ripped up Joseph's arm?"
***
The room looked like a board room any successful corporation might envy. A massive oval conference table dominated the center of the room, with a surface like looking into the depths of Stygia itself. Large leather chairs ringed the table, padded lightly enough to prevent dozing, but well enough to allow for long meetings, the kind of chairs most companies saved for showing off to visiting clients. Seven of them surrounded the table, although sat empty at present. The table stood on a plush carpet of midnight shag. Richly polished hardwood covered the lower half of the walls, with an elaborately scrolled chair rail topping it.
The semblance of reality ended there.
Above the chair rail was nothing. A mortal observer might see stars, or blackness, or grey mist, or any number of things fed to them by a mind desperately trying to process a lack of information. Immortal observers kept their own observations to themselves, but the entity seated at the head of the table always referred to the room as the web room. He lowered his one-eyed gaze from the endless non-vista above the room as the door at the foot of the table opened and admitted some of the only mortals ever to gaze upon it.
One of his most valued lieutenants entered first. Mort owed his liege for the boon of immortality, no matter how limited, and in return he remained unflinchingly loyal as only a warrior born in feudal times could be. He currently appeared to be a young man of indeterminate Mediterranean descent. The chairman knew his lieutenant had the boon of shape shifting from one of the others on the council, and his current appearance always matched his intent. If he looked like a romance novel cover, he planned to use that.
On his heels entered the one man the chairman least liked to see in the room. He'd been required for several reasons, but the only thing that kept him under control was the oath he'd taken. Without those, he would be a free agent, and his natural impulses would put him athwart the council's plans. The chairman was always careful to adhere to exactingly polite behavior around Galahad, lest he inadvertently prompt the knight’s rebellion. He waved his hand in their direction, and a plain golden bowl appeared between them at the foot of the table. Apples the same color as the bowl itself filled it, and each man took one.
Once each man had a chance to refresh himself with the fruit and tumblers of light wine that appeared when reached for, the chairman reached out and pressed a button on a complex corporate phone that appeared when he reached for it.
"Our agents have returned. It is time."
Before he finished speaking, figures appeared in the chairs around the table. The third mortal on the council appeared first, although her continual delving into the arcane may have long since removed the particular of mortality. It was hard to tell now, because as usual she hadn’t come in person. She had the ability to translocate as well as any of the immortals in the room, but unlike most of the others, she had personal dealings in the mortal world, and preferred to keep her physical form involved in them while she met with the council. Morgan had always been lightly subordinate, but her power had become nearly as extensive as she once thought it was. The chairman knew the Plan would never have worked without that power guiding, driving, and manipulating the mortal world. For that reason and that reason alone, she sat at his left hand.
The next pair to arrive materialized in the seats just beyond Morgan. Both were dark women, and both appeared young next to Morgan's prime of life maturity. The chairman had no doubt they had been conferring privately before the meeting. Both Annan and Hel wore their mortal seemings to adhere to the chairman's quirk of wanting to appear a progressive modern leader, and it only enhanced their similarities. The wide white streak through the right side of Hel's hair was the only way to easily tell them apart. The chairman regretted what would happen to both in the final stages of the Plan, they would see the symmetry in goddesses of death being sacrificed after being gorged on a world sacrificed to them.
The next to arrive seemed as insubstantial as Morgan, but the chairman knew his appearance was natural, the result of his tenuous connection to reality. Aeric was a Sidhe lord; his home realm further from the material plane than the conference room in which they sat. The chairman suspected that even in his home realm, Aeric appeared washed out, unreal. Unlike the rest of him, his eyes glowed with a vibrant blue flame. He was nearly as experienced in the magic of his realm as Morgan was in her own. He did not realize it, but his personal presence on the council was a backup to Morgan. His Hunt, on the other hand, was vital to the endgame of the Plan.
The second to last to arrive sat across from Hel, and her eyes narrowed the way they did every time she saw him. The mortals in the room might be excused for thinking it a reaction to the way space bent to fit him into a chair sized for a human, but the chairman knew it was an old, old hatred that burned in her eyes. The Fire Lord Surtr, one of the chairman's oldest enemies; his invite to the council the first sign the chairman had given to prospective allies that old allegiances were over and done. Again, the chairman kept Surtr as a backup to the others, but his fire giants and elementals were integral to the final Plan.
The final arrival chuckled as he phased in. The chairman knew he'd waited until the others had arrived as a subtle power play; both the first and last into a room had advantages, and Loki took every advantage he could. Usually, he frittered those away on some scheme, but often enough they were hidden away, invested to be used at some later date. Again, the uses were usually inconsequential, but even the inconsequential uses sometimes had long-reaching consequences. It had been his Plan, after all.
The chairman passed his gaze over the assembled council, then laid it on the pair seated at the foot.
"Well, Mort? How close are our plans to fruition?"
"We're within a year, Greatfather. Two at the outside."
"So soon?"
Annan betrayed her anxiousness in her tone of voice. Most of the others took notice, and subtly checked their defenses. The chairman did not; he secured his own defenses before he allowed anyone in this room. He built many of them into the room itself.
"I'm sure of it. The world is prepared; we can transmit each step of the plan to almost every home on the planet in real time. When we want them to wonder, they'll wonder. When we want them to rejoice, they'll rejoice. When we want them to hope, they'll hope, and when we bring the curtain down, they'll despair as one."
"Won't that also mean they'll be able to react in real time as well?"
Loki was a past master of elaborate plans. In this case, the elaborate Plan had been his, but many of the details had been worked out by the younger entities in the room. From his perspective, that's what mortals were for: detail work.
"Yes and no. The ones most likely to mount an effective response are disposed to think the whole thing is a hoax. The ones likely to believe are the ones who won't have the capability to respond. There are far more of the latter than the former."
"Why do we even have them at all? Letting mortals disbelieve has always seemed like a bad idea to me." Hel's petulance stemmed from her source of power. Her ranks swelled each time a believer died. Any believer of any deity, since all the others had been subsumed, destroyed, or forced to vacate any realm near the material plane. Those who didn't believe were useless to her. She speculated at least once a meeting on tossing a plague into the world which only attacked those who did not believe. Fortunately, this time Mort had a response.
"The only reason the believers can exist in such appalling numbers is the existence of the unbelievers. They're the ones making the impossible growth rates just barely possible."
"What happened today?"
"We released the hellhounds on the focus point. They menaced the girls, showed credible threat by destroying a guard, and left when the cavalry arrived."
"Are you sure you'll be able to control her, Mort?"
"Of course we will. I'll see to it personally, if I have to, but mother's magic wowed the girl enough that she'll be putty in our hands when the time comes."
"What’s the next step?"
"Next we send another teaser. This time we'll take out one of the female teachers before we cut and run."
"Will you be using the hellhounds again, offspring?"
"No, mother. Cycling our forces will keep the skeptics believing that it's all a hoax for as long as possible. Also, for those who might be marginally effective, like the young people enamored of the recent rash of paranormal literature focusing on hunters of evil, it will prevent them from finding any of the real weaknesses via study."
"So, there are no outstanding problems?"
"None at all, my liege."
"I disagree, Greatfather. Not all of the demons I summoned returned to me unharmed."
Morgan's voice, reverberating slightly due to her projection, was nonetheless cold, emotion leached from it by her distraction. The chairman watched as Mort looked askance at her. His anger visibly grew as she left the contradiction of his report lying there baldly, rather than asking him to explain or elaborating on the damage done. Mort could offer an explanation himself, but that would mean acknowledging the indictment. He could contradict Morgan in turn, but that would put him in conflict with her, who was his strongest supporter among the senior council members.
His salvation, such as it was, came from an unlikely source. Galahad leaned forward and tapped the table to get everyone's attention. Once he had it, he began speaking in a calm, clear voice, neither confrontational nor apologetic.
"There was another there fighting against our demons. She has enough connection to the otherworldly to harm our forces, and she seemed to find the appropriate weapon by chance, although intervention cannot be ruled out."
The chairman knew the value of honest subordinates too well to let the rest of the council descend on the one who questioned their invulnerability and omnipotence. In addition, while he didn’t like him, the Chairman knew the doughty knight was the only completely honest member of the council. If Galahad could, he would destroy the chairman and council without a thought. However, he remained bound by oaths he'd taken, and even if they were taken while under the council of despair, they were all that granted him the much extended lifespan he'd enjoyed. If he betrayed the council, all his years would return to him at once.
Good subordinates were hard to find, so the chairman intervened.
"That is worrying news. From the detail of your report, you have identified this problem. You have a solution?"
"Not yet my liege. I must observe her without interference in order to develop one. By your leave?"
"Do so. This meeting is adjourned."
***
Another place, this one so far outside reality that time itself only holds marginal sway. Here there is no question of whether insanity will occur in sentient minds; only when and how. The only protection from madness here is madness itself, and the two entities meeting in this non-place had succumbed long ago. In one case, the madness is zealotry, in the other, nihilism.
The entities do not communicate with speech; the laws of physics are less than guidelines here. They do not communicate with traditional telepathy; direct mind to mind contact in this place would destroy one mind, if not both. Instead, thoughts, emotions, images, words, and pure abstract concepts are packaged and released to float to the other like a message in a bottle. Novices here communicate only with difficulty, but these two are both old hands.
One entity, the younger, imagines itself as human. A young man of southern European descent, prematurely gray at the temples from the stresses not of this place, but of his task. He initiates the conversation, his mental voice that of a commander as strict with himself as he is with his subordinates.
"It is time. This world", an image, a location relative not to the speaker, but to all other universes the speaker knows of, "is at a turning point. It is due for renewal", images of autumn followed by winter followed by spring, of dusk followed by night followed by day. "It is a keystone world; collapse," images of a world becoming as the place in which the two existed, "will be followed by a chain reaction of collapse in other worlds."
The other entity, immeasurably older, a terrapin whose existence stretches downward into infinity. It focuses here and subordinates itself to the young man from ennui, not inferiority. The fatigue of ages fills its response, the questions asked out of duty, not curiosity.
"Goals? Resources? Likelihood of success? Likelihood of survival?" The last question contains a glimmer of curiosity.
"Support the three who can prevent collapse. Only those which those three can acquire with your guidance. In present configuration, one in twenty. In present configuration, one in forty in likely success cases, significantly less in failure cases."
Wondering disbelief colors the great turtle's response, "This is a suicide mission."
The young man's only answer is wordless confirmation.
The terrapin's final response before departure is relief.