Sell you a Bridge chapter 38

Hokus and Pokus Occult Curioso July 11th 2010 1:00 PM EDT

Madame  Xanadu's shop was wrecked, but we couldn't see it until we got closer.  She must have had some sort of illusion over the place because until we  were about ten feet away from the store front it looked just like it had  before. Once we crossed the ten foot line though it became clear that  something bad had gone down here. The windows were blown out from the  inside, with glass scattered everywhere and the occult posters and signs  hanging in tatters from the frames of the shop's glass facade.

The  door was hanging off it's hinges at an angle and was twisted and warped  by heat, and little tongues of flame danced on the pieces of shredded  paper at irregular intervals. As we stepped over the threshold it was  clear that the damage was pretty consistent throughout the entire shop,  with all the tables blown over and books and magical curiosities alight  on the ash covered ground. Interspersed through the fire, green frost  rime interspersed with blue and purple and dancing golden lightning  covered the walls and the occasional spike of stone jutted up with  bloody tatters of what looked like razor sharp silk hanging across the  top of the room like streamers.

Jim  clicked his tongue "Judging by the amount of blood here, quite a few  Talon's met their end in this battle. Madame Xanadu is a terrifying foe.  The question here is what would be worth all this? She was the keeper  of quite a few powerful artifacts, but most know that crossing her is a  fools errand. She's a true immortal, and once she recovers from whatever  they've done to her she's going to rain down hell on them they can't  imagine. She was holding back because of her things, but even so she did  some real damage."

Nightshade  stepped up, looking around to try to find the owner in the debris "This  is wrong. The Court of Owls are pompous twits from what I've heard but  Madame Xanadu is a global heavyweight. If Morgana had come with them I  could see them MAYBE pulling this off, but this whole neighborhood would  be glass if that had happened. This is just...out of their league." She  sounded genuinely concerned, and for good reason, the Court were scary  enough without whatever the hell they stole from here.

We  all fanned out to search the store, hoping to find something that might  tell us what had happened. I stepped through warped space and ducked  under cutting strands of light as I combed through the place genuinely  terrified by how much damage Madame Xanadu had been able to do with zero  warning about this attack. Magic was seriously scary shit. Even with my  perfect memory I was having trouble learning basic wardcracking,  without my powers helping cheat learning this kind of magic would  take...well centuries.

But  then again Madame Xanadu was a world renowned magus, it wasn't  surprising that someone at the high end of the magic spectrum would be  using the good stuff. I felt like a kid learning addition flipping  through a fucking calculus book. Artemis and Reggie were right by my  side and we were levering bookshelves and upended tables off the ground  looking for the sorceress who was supposed to be here. I had a thought  and shot a panicked look to Jim across the room "Hey boss!" I shouted  over "We aren't going to run into the Batman or one of his justice pals  are we? Because honestly this looks pretty bad from an outside  perspective."

Nightshade  burst into giggles "I doubt we'll see him around here, Batman avoids  magic whenever possible, we tend to police our own, even in Gotham. That  said even if he showed up it wouldn't be an issue. Outside out  Shadowpact duties we all have our own pursuits. I'm a superhero and I'm  well acquainted with the League. If Batman showed up I'd explain what's  going on." She shot me a wink, that her glowing white eyes made very  obvious "Don't worry, I'll protect you from the mean old Bat."

I  blushed at that and turned away to sulk while Artemis snickered at me. I  glared at my best friend out of the corner of my eye. She shot me a  smirk "I haven't seen you this flustered since we first started hanging  out, back when you were trying to figure out how to get in my pants. So  you have some kind of cape fetish? Or are you just this awkward around  all women you find attractive. I would have thought having a girlf-" She  stopped talking at the flash of hurt that stole across my face as my  stomach tightened at the mention of Annabel. "Fuck. I'm sorry Morgan I  just got caught up in the moment and I..." She trailed off, clearly  grasping for words.

I  just smiled and focused on my work "It's fine. It's been a few days.  It's natural to have it slip your mind now and then. Hell, I know I do. I  keep thinking about calling her before I remember. I still can't delete  her number from my phone. I know I'll have to at some point, but it  just feels too much like letting forgetting her. I feel like an idiot,  being so torn up over her after what she did, but it's just...how I  feel, you know?" Every time I thought about her I remembered she was  gone, then I remembered why, then I remembered how, in that order. It  was like reliving our whole relationship beginning to end in an instant.

We  lapsed into silence as we worked, clearing away strange object and  unusual books. We weren't cleaning the stuff up, just shoving our way  through it until we could track down the Madame, but there was just so  damn much of it. I suspected she might have packed some more things into  this place than the space would allow, which given what I'd seen from  her with that back room was...I froze. The back room. That was the  safest place in the store, she would have definitely hidden there if she  could have and she'd clearly had time to send that message.

I  dropped a bookshelf immediately, earning a yelp and a glare from Reggie  whose foot it landed on and loped off towards the door to that weird  courtyard. Everyone else seemed to notice me running towards it and  followed after me as I ran to the strange door in the back with all the  levers and latches. I stood in front of the door smugly and looked at  the various mechanisms sure my perfect memory would...do absolutely no  good here. The pills improved my memory as an active effect going  forward, which meant that past events weren't dug back up.

I'd  come here with Madame Xanadu before I'd gotten the ability so I had  absolutely no clue what the combination to this thing was. I reached out  to touch it gently, trying to see if I could maybe force myself to  remember but Warlock's Daughter reached out faster than the eye could  track and smacked my hand away. I hissed and pulled it back, glaring at  her, but she simply stared at the door with her ghostly pupiless eyes.  "That door has been tampered with. There's is some sort of dark magic  affecting it, I can sense it."

Nightshade  stepped up to glance at the door before focusing on a small sliver of  bone jammed into a crevice where one of the levers was. I hadn't even  noticed it before. She held out a hand and muttered a few sentences,  obviously trying to figure out what the hell was going on. She jerked  her hand back with a hiss, cradling it as if it had been burned. "The  Court of Owls didn't make this. They got it from someone powerful. It's a  shard of bone from a master thief soaked in the heart blood of thirteen  kidnapped virgins. This is evil magic, but strong. I imagine they got  it from Morgana."

She  looked deeply disturbed by the item, which I totally got given what  she'd just told us about it. Acheron floated forward. "Let me. Thing's  like this are designed to curse the next person to open the door as a  security measure. I can connect with that sort of magic even better than  Gentleman Ghost, I should be able to reactivate the artifact without  any sort of negative effects if I..." He trailed off into a string of  unintelligible mutters and sharp cracking syllables I didn't understand.  He obviously knew his stuff because as he spun his spells the shard of  bone began to glow.

The  light got brighter as he spoke increasing second by second as Acheron  chanted. I could smell ozone and the faint tang of blood in the air and  shadows around us lengthened a bit. I tasted cold wet dirt on the back  of my tongue and off in the distance I heard the tolling of a bell.  Clearly Acheron and Jim had a few stylistic commonalities in their  magic. The light quickly became so blinding we couldn't look at it  before there was a loud bang. The shard exploded, taking a fist sized  chunk of door with it and the brass door swung open slowly under its own  weight.

Acheron  glanced back at us and then down at the door. "If Madame Xanadu asks,  it was like that when we found it." We all nodded solemnly and followed  the red jacketed ghost as he floated through the door. Like the last  time I'd gone to the shop we emerged into a courtyard. The artifact or  whatever was clearly designed to get the use here. The pedestals that  had held the items of power she'd offered me last time were empty now,  and some of them were destroyed. There was plenty of debris strewn about  the courtyard and I could even see dead Talon's lying here or there.

None  of them was the right body type to be my uncle, though I wasn't sure if  I should be relieved by that or not. However the most attention  grabbing thing here was the fountain. Or rather, what use to be a  fountain. Where the stone edifice had stood now there was just wreckage.  The water feature had been smashed apart, leaving only the pool at its  base, and from that pool rose a huge chunk of ice. The ice had spiraling  patterns of frost forming intricate and powerful magical symbols. I  recognized some of them from my study of wards, and there were entire  castles I'd read about with less defenses than that chunk of frozen  water.

What  really caught our attention though was the woman inside of it. Madame  Xanadu sat suspended in vertical slumber inside the frozen defensive  construct. It was obvious from her pale face and bloodstained lips that  she was hurt, and her cheeks looked sunken and morose under the odd  illumination that the small iceberg allowed through, her face shifting  constantly with shadows of powerful runes and dangerous spells that gave  the impression of being part of her actual design. Like she'd taken  account the angle of refraction and built yet another spell into that  dimension of the magic.

Normally  that would have been the most stunning thing, but I was a bit  distracted. Not by the wounds or by the feeling of power coming from the  spells either. No, my distraction was coming from the white hilted  knife the size of my forearm that had been driven into her chest.  Carnwennan, the knife we had stolen from Zatara's house over a month ago  was firmly stuck through Madame Xanadu's sternum. I turned to look at  Artemis and Reggie, and despite their faces being hidden behind masks I  know they were showing the same horror that mine was. Madame Xanadu had  been robbed and possibly killed by the Court of Owls, and it was our fault.