10 – Finding Motive Force

Erika ground her teeth as she circled the motel for the fifth—no, sixth—time. The neon vacancy sign flickered, casting a sickly red light across the empty parking lot, making the entire area feel somehow more ominous. She couldn’t tell what was going on inside. Her eyes scanned every shadow, every movement, and all the people still standing about watching; the cold sent most of the people away, either back to their cars or, the more daring of them, back to the neighboring motel rooms.

A squad car finally rolled up, blue lights strobing across the cracked asphalt. Two more joined, followed by a black, lightless car. Erika pressed lower in her seat, watching as uniformed officers started securing the area. If The Hanged Man wasn’t in that black car, he would certainly be here soon. She did not want a confrontation now of all times.

Erika pulled away again, looping around the block. As she had done every time, Erika scanned the sidewalks and alleys for Delilah. Once, she glimpsed a girl’s silhouette ducking behind a dumpster, but when she doubled back, there was only a discarded burger wrapper left behind. Erika didn’t know what Nya was, but if Delilah didn’t want to be found and Nya could detect Erika’s approach, finding the girl would be impossible.

The cops began cordoning off the area, even positioning their squad cars to block traffic to the road. Erika found herself unable to drive past again. The Fixer was still missing, and Erika had seen no sign of the steampunk angel either. Only the police remained, clustered in tight knots as they likely awaited more supernatural backup.

With The Fixer’s words echoing in her mind, Erika turned away from the motel entirely, heading back toward home. This wasn’t their first time escaping some reality-Terminator. They would be fine.

She just had to believe that.

It was a long, silent drive home—one of those times where she didn’t feel even remotely in the mood for music, yet her thoughts were running to where she might have blown through a dozen red lights without noticing. She wasn’t even aware of where she was until she turned down the street where the Walker family was renting their current house. Her autopilot got her home without wrecking the truck.

She wasn’t even sure what she had been thinking over. The Fixer, reality, outsiders, The Mummy, the naked woman, Delilah, Nya, and more besides, but her thoughts were so jumbled that she couldn’t recall any coherent epiphanies by the time she snapped out of it. The thing that finally snapped her out of it was a car in the tiny rental driveway—not the old Corolla, but another familiar car.

Sure enough, she opened the door to find Carter amid a serious-looking meeting with Bethany and Daniel. They had papers spread out on the table, a few books laid out, and Daniel was showing off something on his phone. Were this any other group of people, Erika might have thought they were playing some tabletop game.

“Erika! I’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” Daniel said, standing as she walked in. He sounded annoyed, maybe even angry.

“Yeah… I’ve had a lot of shit going on,” she sighed, more tired than anything.

Daniel scowled. “Too busy to check your phone?” Definitely angry.

“Where’s Mommy?” Carter asked, rescuing Erika. “She said she had to go see you.”

“I don’t know,” Erika answered honestly. “They… had an incident. I’m not sure if we have a serial-killer aunt anymore.”

“What?” Bethany asked in a flat tone.

Erika ignored Bethany, focusing on Carter for the moment. “The Fixer is fine, and Mom, presumably. They said they would be back, but… didn’t say when.”

She tried to sugarcoat it, but Carter wasn’t stupid. She watched his face shift from curious to concerned. Daniel and Bethany weren’t far behind in that department, the former’s anger vanishing almost immediately. Sitting down, Erika explained everything that had happened over the last few hours, from her encounter with Delilah to The Fixer telling her to get out of there so they could fight off some steampunk angel on their own.

By the end, she was rubbing Carter’s shoulder, reassuring him, while Daniel and Bethany just sort of stared in bewilderment. “They said they had done this kind of thing before,” Erika said. “They know what they’re doing. I don’t know if they have to go lie low for a while or if they’ll just pop in tomorrow morning, making breakfast like nothing happened. The only thing we can do is trust that.”

It didn’t feel like enough.

“Your family is so weird,” Bethany said, earning a sharp nudge from Daniel.

“Like we have room to talk,” he grumbled. “I don’t know how to help with that Outsider thing—”

“Same,” Erika said with a shrug.

“But at least it was just one tattooed person.”

“Just one?” Erika asked, raising an eyebrow. One was more than enough for her. To the best of her knowledge, The Castle still had the other one captured. If he had escaped, Erika would have expected a notice from The Director or one of his underlings.

Erika hoped he hadn’t. Of the two of them, he certainly felt more dangerous. While his tattoos didn’t stop her from breaking him like the woman’s did, the monk felt smarter. Erika would have lost her fight with him entirely if not for Leslie’s save, and if he actually wanted to kill her rather than capture her, he probably could have taken her out at range while still dazed from the wreck. He moved and danced in their fight, where the woman only slowly moved forward, trusting in her invulnerability to make the fights inevitable.

She obviously wasn’t invulnerable, even before Erika figured out the trick to her tattoos. Rick nearly sliced her head off… or, maybe she was invulnerable, given she had recovered from something that would have killed anyone else. Either way, she felt easier to stall and escape from, if nothing else.

Both times she had fought the woman, she had allies with her. The one time she fought the monk, she had been on her own until the very last moment. That could skew her perspective of their abilities somewhat, but she felt that was a fairly accurate assessment.

Regardless, it would have been a disaster if both had shown up at once.

Daniel, however, didn’t explain right away what he meant. Instead, he picked up his phone, scrolled through it for a moment, then set it back down facing Erika.

It took a moment to recognize the mural from the museum, not because she had forgotten about it, but because she didn’t expect a picture on Daniel’s phone. Without a word, he zoomed in on one particular corner of the mural, showing off a quartet of people. Their backs were to the viewer, watching whatever was going on in the rest of the mural, but four distinctive shapes stood out, all with thick tattoos drawn over their backs. Two looked feminine, two masculine, and one was distinctly larger than the rest.

Erika let out a long sigh, realizing what Daniel was getting at.

“We think there are more of them out there.”

“Well…” Erika trailed off, genuinely not knowing what to say to that new information. “Well.”

With an optimistic smile, Bethany said, “At least you know there are more of them, so you won’t be surprised when they show up.”

One thing after another. Was it too much to ask for a break?

Maybe she had already gotten her break. She should have been more diligent back in November and December, but she instead picked up Rick’s sword as a side-project, distracting herself with The Puppet, The Eclipse, and those cursed cubes… which had inadvertently called down the monk on The Hunters.

“This is really starting to piss me off.”

“Starting?” Daniel asked.

“It’s just… so frustrating. These bastards hide away like cowards, popping out of nowhere to attack us, then disappearing into the mists again.” Erika slammed a fist against the table. “I can’t do anything. I’m always on the back foot, always reacting. You know what? I hope The Eclipse’s thing fails, and a big, huge, maggot-infested portal pops open in the middle of the city. Then I can march in, bash everything to pieces, and see how they like that.”

“You… might break more chains if you go too wild. That’s probably not a good thing, right?”

Erika groaned, tugging on her hair.

“But maybe there is something else you can do!” Daniel hurriedly offered, swiping past a few more pictures of the mural at the museum.

He ended up on a tall statue, one similar to the one Erika had broken, but somehow more… meaty. Like they replaced the metal skeleton with one of flesh and bone.

“Beth and I checked out the museum—it reopened a week or two ago. We’ve been trying to tell you about it, but…”

“You could have sent me these pictures…”

“You would have run off on your own,” Daniel said with a glare.

Erika opened her mouth, but found she had no counterargument. She focused on the phone instead of Daniel, swiping back and forth a few times between different shots of the statue and the surrounding murals.

“Maybe you can go touch it, see if it has some film around it, or just break the statue again.”

A cathartic image of her bashing the statue to pieces popped into Erika’s mind, but sadly, she couldn’t see any way that it would do anything. She shook her head with a sigh. “Only idiots would put a magic statue back where we already knew it was. This is probably just a mundane replacement.”

“We were just talking about that,” Carter spoke up for the first time since the talk of The Fixer ended, pushing some papers around. Erika easily recognized them as all the locations where ‘gas leaks’ occurred, having stared at similar maps a few months prior, with the museum circled in a heavy marker. “What if the location is important? Like, the statue has to be there?”

Erika admitted she hadn’t thought of it like that before. In fact, she had hardly thought of the statue since the night she destroyed it… because she had destroyed it. There wasn’t anything left to think about.

Or, there had been nothing before now, Erika thought as she slid over the phone again.

“It might be good to check out. Couldn’t hurt,” she said, feeling a little better about one thing. She didn’t know that it would help much; maybe if she could remember the chant that first cultist had used to open the portal, she could try it too, but it had been just a bunch of random noise to her ears. Still, it gave her a little hope and something to do—it was one step on a stairway, whether she would find the second step or find herself blocked by a brick wall would have to wait.

“It could hurt a little if the place is being protected,” Daniel said, swiping the phone back to the tattooed figures on the mural.

That was a good point. “You went there on your own?” Erika asked with a scowl. “I can’t imagine Leslie would have agreed to that. Does he even know you’re here right now?”

Daniel rolled his eyes in almost the same way that Erika might have when a teacher was chewing her out. “In order: I wasn’t on my own, Dad did not agree or know, and he knows I’m here.”

“Who went with you? Sofia?”

“Me!” Bethany said, holding up a hand, earning both her and Daniel a flat look from Erika.

Daniel at least had the good grace to look sheepish. “We were just trying to find a way to help. We figured it was a public place, during the day, and that they wouldn’t just randomly murder museum patrons, so it would be safe. None of them should know us, so we’re clear there too.”

“The monk might have seen you after the… crash.”

“Dad said that Rick said that he’s locked up with The Castle.”

“For all I know, telepathy is a thing,” Erika said, though she was arguing more for the pedantry of it now. It was a good way to distract herself from the day’s events. “I kind of got the impression that The Mind could read minds.”

“We can’t just hide in our homes for the rest of our lives,” Carter said.

Erika regarded her brother with a raised eyebrow, surprised at him offering input without first being asked. It wasn’t the first time that had happened either. She looked around the table again, then asked a question that had been on her mind since she had seen Daniel’s car parked outside. “How come you all are together, talking about this anyway?”

“That’s thanks to me,” Bethany said, haughtily throwing a braid back over her shoulder. “Dan’s been all whiny that you aren’t picking up your phone. Carter is the same. So I thought, why not meet up and go over what we know, then we could hatch a plan to get you to come back here without rushing off to do something stupid on your own… but then you came back on your own, so I guess it was kinda pointless.” She deflated somewhat toward the end, glaring at Erika like she ruined all her plans.

“Your mom was here too,” Daniel added. “Until…”

Erika glanced at the stove clock. Four hours had passed since she and Delilah had arrived at the hotel, about three since she fled from the steampunk angel. There was no sign of Leah or The Fixer, not even a text message.

Daniel clapped his hands together, demanding Erika’s attention back at the table. “Right. So, we have a first step: Investigate the statue. But we have another plan too, don’t we?”

Erika looked around, waiting to hear plan two, only to find everyone staring at her. “We do?”

“Focus, Erika. You’re the one who came up with this plan,” he said, sliding another paper across the table to her.

She recognized it without even needing to skim over it. The clip-art of a broken window was her helpful illustration to show off the plan’s idea: break things to attract The Mummy. The good news was that the plan worked. It so very, clearly worked. The naked woman showed up at the hotel because Erika had been breaking things; the monk showed up at Cedar Lake because her watch had compounded the ripples, calling him straight to her. Tonight had been different, given that The Mummy was apparently after Delilah as well, but Erika didn’t doubt for a minute that the woman focused on her after realizing the two of them were together.

The problem was that drawing their attention was dangerous. Far more dangerous than she had realized when initially coming up with the plan. Granted, things would probably go better if they were prepared, and more so if they weren’t in a moving vehicle, but…

Once bitten, twice shy.

“Just to make things clear for us regular folk,” Bethany said. “The Stalker chick can find anyone, right?”

“Anyone she has seen,” Erika confirmed.

“And she saw the naked chick.”

“That’s different. Something about the naked chick seems to block supernatural effects—her name might be Jack, by the way.” The woman said it when she first showed up, but now that Erika thought about it, it might have just been a reference to The Shining…

Which raised all sorts of questions. The naked woman didn’t seem the type to sit down and watch movies.

“Weird name,” Bethany said. “Continuing my question though, The Stalker has only seen the naked Jack, right?”

“Right.”

“But The Castle was tracking the monk somehow.”

“Correct. They previously encountered both the monk and Jack, but could only track the former, probably for the same reasons.”

“Nobody seen these other two?” Bethany asked, finger on the phone.

“If anyone has, they didn’t tell me. I’d assume no, however.”

“Gotcha. Maybe call them and ask how their tracking worked? Same with The Stalker. Get both to watch us break things, then, if breaking things draws out these other two, being able to tell where they are will at least help us not get ambushed constantly, even if it doesn’t work on Jack.”

Erika nodded along. She wasn’t sure that The Puppet and The Castle would work together anymore than either would work with The Eclipse, but The Castle was at least setting aside some of their animosity in the name of preventing their prophesied apocalypse in Chicago, so it could be worth a shot.

“What about The Eclipse? They own the city, so surely they’ve got resources. The Church too. They know everything, so they must know something, right?”

“I don’t know about The Church. The Fixer was trying to get information from them way back before everything went to shit, and they had nothing. That was a few months ago, so I guess things could have changed.” She had kind of thought that The Church would inform her or The Fixer if they discovered anything, but after her latest meeting with The Analyst, she wasn’t quite so sure about that. They might well not care if Chicago burned down, so long as their archives were secure. “As for The Eclipse, I’m still hoping The Adjustment pulls through and gets me a meeting, so I can ask then.”

Bethany simply nodded before sitting back down.

It was a good plan, as far as Erika could see. If the safer path of the museum led to nothing, they could go back to Erika’s original plan. They didn’t actually need to fight The Mummy, not in that moment, at least. If The Stalker or whoever tracked people for The Castle could just get their eyes on someone relevant, all they had to do was escape. Then, it would be her turn to plot and ambush, her turn to do the acting.

Erika’s eyes drifted to the clock again. Not tonight.

The museum would be closed anyway. While she could break in again, she would prefer at least one trip during the day to see if there was any worth in risking a break-in, but that could wait until after The Fixer got back.

They would surely get back.