23 – Answers to Questions Often Lead to More Questions

“Looks like we got away just in time,” Simone said, hand to her brow as she peered down from the second story of the parking garage.

The Museum, large and squat, was easy to see even with a few buildings obscuring parts of it from view. One street around its sides was visible, though it was a bit too far to really see. Flashing blue and red lights lit up the sides of the museum and the tops of the surrounding buildings. Police cars and ambulances filled the road. There were even firetrucks despite the lack of any smoke or fire.

Despite the commotion, Erika noted with some relief that there were no signs of lamprey vampires running around. No earthquake threatened to shake the museum to the ground. No massive red tongues lashed out, crashing into the building. If she hadn’t known better, she might have simply thought there was nothing more interesting going on than a like skirmish between two gangs.

“I’d still like to put more distance between that place and us,” Erika said, turning away. The Stalker was at her side, peering out at the museum with her eyes all shimmery. Simone was back in the SUV next to Erika’s truck while Michael stood outside, gun out and eyes alert.

“I appreciate the save back there,” Erika continued. “Shoot me a text when you want to call in that debt. Or if you just want to chat, I suppose. But for now, I’ve got to go get The Fixer all… fixed up.”

“Ah ha…” The Stalker said, her short laugh lacking humor. “Try not to die before we next meet,” she added. With one last glance at the museum, she turned back to her SUV.

In moments, they were off and away.

That left Erika and the being in question.

Leah—The Fixer—didn’t look good. She stood over at the truck, carefully removing one of the barbed hooks from its spot through the palm of her hand. Erika grimaced, wincing in stomach-curdling empathy, before she steeled herself. This was not Leah.

“Get in,” Erika said with no warmth in her tone.

The Fixer looked up with a hint of pain in her eyes. Emotional pain? Physical pain? Both?

Erika tried to put it out of her mind as they got into the truck, her behind the wheel and The Fixer in the passenger seat. She glanced to her side, lips pressed firm, not sure at all what to feel about the situation. The chain dangling from Leah’s eye socket was still there. Just looking at it made Erika’s stomach churn even more.

She tried to say something. With that iron mask still fused with her face, it sounded like she couldn’t even open her mouth.

“I could probably break that mask,” Erika said, significantly less certain about her chances of success than she would like to be. “Might break your jaw by accident.”

The Fixer shook her head. She held up a finger.

Erika was about to hand over her phone so that she could at least type down some answers when something changed.

The air felt a lot like it did when Carter twisted time around his finger, but not quite the same. A strange, shiver coursed through the truck’s cabin. Something like a heat haze enveloped The Fixer, but not. As if reality flickered between rendered frames. For a heartbeat, Erika saw double: Leah’s bloodied face and a stranger’s sharp features superimposed, both real, both occupying the same location in space, neither solid.

The chain in her eye socket unwove, links dissolving into static. The iron mask cracked like old paint, flakes peeling away to reveal smooth skin beneath—but not Leah’s. A man’s jawline, framed by a black goatee, appeared over the smooth skin. His clothes rippled, fabric reknitting into a fine suit jacket, the bloodstains fading through as though sucked backward in time.

When the haze settled, a stranger sat in the passenger seat. One Erika recognized as the man who met with the nun the night she staked out Leah’s car.

He rolled his shoulders with a wince. “Better,” he muttered, voice deep and too suave.

Erika tensed. She didn’t have her bat in hand. Even if she did, swinging it inside the cramped confines of her truck wasn’t plausible.

“Erika—”

“Shut up!” Erika snapped. With The Fixer no longer wearing her mother’s face, she found it a whole lot easier to get angry with him. Despite the awkward quarters, she reached over, grasping the collar of his dandy suit. “Where is my mother?” she hissed.

“Safe,” The Fixer said, leaning back against the headrest, closing his eyes. “Resting now. She needs it after…”

Erika pulled him forward and slammed him back against the seat. Given their positionings, she knew he was just humoring her. Even a regular human could have ignored such a cumbersome movement. She didn’t much care. “That was you the entire time. Don’t deny it.”

“Well, yes, but also no,” he said. “It’s complicated to explain.”

“You’ve got about five seconds to uncomplicate it or I’ll…” Erika ground her teeth. “I’ll make sure you regret it.”

“I am her and she is me, but obviously not at this exact moment. Except we are.”

Erika lifted him forward and slammed him back once again.

“It’s like… quantum superposition. Both ideas are true, except I’m not currently observing her to allow her time to rest. We’ll still need to remove the hooks and heal her, but she’s suspended at the moment.”

“Your idea of simplifying things is to jump into quantum mechanics? I don’t know jack shit about all that.”

The Fixer chuckled, his humor somehow soothing despite everything. “Neither do I. I just heard the terms here and there over the years, and they sounded like they fit. Like I said, it’s complicated. I don’t know how to better explain.”

Erika held him for a long moment more, glaring.

“We shouldn’t linger here. The Mummy has hidden agents everywhere and I do not intend to be captured again.”

With a huff, Erika finally let him go. That, at least, was something she could agree with. “The masked people didn’t seem that big of a threat,” she said as she turned the engine on. “We dealt with several of them before finding you. I’m more worried about those maggots and monsters.” She couldn’t stop her shudder.

Something about the whole incident gave her a bad feeling. The chains, the membrane… What had the postman said? The maggot temple had been sealed off for his thousand-plus years of existence? And now it was open. Thanks to her.

Hopefully, that portal being closed would keep all those things contained off wherever they were. If not…

Erika shook her head and drove.

Out of the parking lot, Erika headed directly away from the museum. It wasn’t the direction she needed to go, but she figured going for a wide loop around the place was going to be much safer than going anywhere near it. She had already texted Anna, so hopefully the biker was already back at the arcade getting medical equipment ready.

Even though he looked fine, The Fixer said that Leah would still need help.

“How did you find me?” The Fixer asked. “How do you know—”

“How did you get captured?” Erika snapped back. “I wasn’t just making small talk a moment ago. Those masked people were pathetic. I can’t believe some big bad Outsider-class being went and got jumped by them,” she said, trying and failing to hold back her sarcasm.

“How do—” He cut himself off after receiving a glare from Erika. “My questions later, I take it.”

“Glad you can read the room.”

It felt a bit strange talking to him like this. She had been terrified of the potential consequences of him finding out she knew back when she and Carter first realized that their mother got body snatched. Now, she was relatively confident that The Fixer meant no harm—at least to her and Carter—and she was pissed that she had to do this at all.

And she was still hopped up on adrenaline from the whole ordeal at the museum. She was trying to put most of that out of her mind. There were so many things to worry about that lamprey men and maggots and massive tongues didn’t even make the top ten of her list.

“I’ve been tracking the entity known as The Mummy for most of my existence,” he said, closing his eyes. “You were born as a human, so I don’t expect you to quite understand, but I emerged fully-fledged with a mission in mind. I don’t know who set that mission or why, but my reason to exist is to undermine the cult of The Mummy. I’ve had encounters with them before, but in the last ten years or so, they’ve been hunting me down. They’ve learned how to fight me, how to avoid me, and, now, how to capture me. Though it wasn’t the masked men who jumped me, as you said. It was a group of tattooed individuals—”

“Ah. So you’re just bad at your one job. Got it.”

The Fixer opened his eyes, looking over at her. For a moment, she wondered if she pushed just a little too far. Then she remembered that this asshole stole her mother, put her and Carter in danger from these guys, and overall just brought all this shit down on her head. Immediately, any guilt vanished.

“Why my mom?” Erika asked. “There are plenty of people out there who don’t even have kids that will miss them when you put on their skin like an old suit and go get yourself killed at the hands of some nutjob cultists.” Stopped at a red light, she took her eyes off the road and glared at him. “Is it because of me and Carter? We’re not like other people, and you clearly know that.”

“Ah… About that. You’ve got the cause and effect mixed up.”

“Excuse me?”

“You and Carter are not like other people because I made a deal with your mother. Eighteen or so years ago now.”

Erika’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Excuse me?”

“To be clear, the deal I made didn’t directly involve you. Your mother… Let’s say she made some poor choices that resulted in her being hospitalized and effectively placed on hospice care as her body slowly decayed. Until I stepped in. My kind can offer exchanges. I offered to restore her to full health. In exchange, she agreed to become part of me—my disguise in this world—after a period no less than fifteen years.

“You see, my kind doesn’t exist properly in this world. The reality itself fights against our existence. We have to effectively hide within others just to stave that off.” He gestured to his face. “This guise, I call Mister Dice, was never a proper person. I cobbled it together from bits of other people that I took in exchange for deals. A head of hair from a man wanting wealth, a fine wardrobe from someone wanting the skills of a surgeon, a story of a lost childhood dog from a woman who didn’t want the memories, all just to make it a little more real. But it isn’t enough. It won’t be long before I am forced to return to Leah—a true and complete guise.”

A long silence lapsed as Erika tried to process exactly what The Fixer was trying to tell her. He could call it what he wanted, but it sounded an awful lot like he was going around making devil deals with anyone who would listen. And apparently, Leah listened. Not only did she listen, but she gave up her whole life, not just some small aspect of it. Though there was one thing missing.

Desperately hoping she was wrong, she asked a question that she didn’t believe was true. “So the child of someone who makes such a contract turns out to have superpowers?”

“Well, not exactly…”

“God fucking hell,” Erika groaned.

“Leah’s recovery took longer than expected, and I stuck around to ensure she both lived and recovered. One thing became another and—”

“You knocked up someone you were going to become or merge with or whatever. That’s so fucked I don’t even know where to begin unpacking that…”

“Language, Erika—”

“Shut the fuck up, you don’t get to fuck off on a milk run for eighteen years only to come back and start acting like a father…” Erika trailed off as she realized the implications of what that meant for Carter. “I don’t remember you being around as a child. Carter is seven years younger than me… Where… When…”

“Given the dangerous nature of my existence, Leah and I decided I shouldn’t be around,” he said. “But as you grew up, you started showing off abnormal abilities for a human to have. Leah got worried and called me. Maybe you remember me being around for a few months. Maybe not, but I was there—”

“And knocked up Mom again? You have got to be the worst… I don’t even know. Whatever you are.”

“Fair,” he said with a small sigh.

Silence filled the truck once again, this time leaving the air feeling like it was simmering. Erika fumed, facing forward, not even looking at this… thing at her side as she focused on driving. Except she wasn’t focused at all. Her mind hopped around from one idea to the next, each thought somehow making her angrier.

If Leah knew this was going to be a thing, she could have mentioned it. Prepared her and Carter for the whole becoming someone else thing. Maybe even let them meet The Fixer, if only to get to know him. She wanted to be more mad at him and him alone, but no. Everyone sucked here.

She stewed in her thoughts for long enough that she didn’t even realize she was still driving until she exited the expressway and slowed down at a red light. A sudden jolt of adrenaline hit her as she wondered just how many lights she blew through. Shaking her head, she decided it didn’t matter. If she hadn’t been pulled over by now, she must not have run too many.

“Leah is alive,” she said, not sure if she was questioning The Fixer or just reminding herself. “If you switch back, is that mask going to be there still?”

“Yes. And the hooks.”

Erika shuddered at the reminder. The one in Leah’s eye was especially disturbing, the way it just dangled down the side of her face. “If we get that mask off, how do I know if I’m speaking with her or you?”

“There isn’t a true way of knowing. I know everything Leah knows, and Leah knows everything I know. The guise is perfect by necessity. Reality would notice if it wasn’t.”

Erika glared from the corner of her eye, her fingers drumming against the steering wheel as she waited for the light to turn green. “What is an Outsider-class being?”

“Where did you learn—”

“My questions still,” Erika said through clenched teeth.

The Fixer’s jaw clapped shut before he nodded his head. “It’s fairly evident in its name. A class of being that originated outside. It’s also somewhat generic—there are a lot of things that are classified as Outsiders-class beings which aren’t. I dislike the classification system as a whole. It is a recent development, stemming from the theories of a mad genius who believed not only that everything should fit into neat little categories, but that everything could fit.”

“So it’s meaningless?”

“Well…”

“Stop. You’re distracting me. What are you? Some classical devil meeting people at the crossroads?”

The Fixer laughed. His smooth, suave tones might have charmed Erika were she not so irritated. He seemed so easy-going, even despite the situation, that Erika could easily imagine actually liking him if she had ever gotten to know him before all this. “I’ve been called such before. It’s not completely inaccurate, though you would be hard-pressed to find someone who goes around calling themselves a devil. It’s a bit gauche.”

Gauche? He clearly didn’t know who he was talking to. If she could call herself a devil, she would be signing her name Erika, The Devil everywhere she went.

Except…

Couldn’t she call herself that?

“If I’m the daughter of a devil, does that make me a devil too? Or some kind of… nephilim?” she asked, dragging the word out of some misbegotten recesses of her mind. She wasn’t sure where she heard it, but she was pretty sure it fit.

“Erika. People will make fun of you if you go around calling yourself things like that.”

“Yeah, well. Mom says people will call my tattoo the ‘tramp stamp of my generation,’” she said, patting her chest just under her breasts. “Don’t really care. I’ll do what I want if it makes me happy.”

“Also, nephilim is the product of a union between an angel and a mortal. Cambion is the devilish equivalent.”

“To-ma-to, po-ta-to.” The light finally turned green. “All I know is that I’ve got superpowers and so does Carter. They have to come from you, but I don’t turn into other people.” She paused in thought for a moment. “Then again, I’ve never really tried making devil contracts with people.”

“You would be categorized as an Inheritor-class being under the Caligari classification system. Which, again, is fairly useless. All it means is that you’ve likely got weaker abilities than whatever being you inherited from.”

“Cambion sounds cooler,” Erika muttered to herself after a long moment. “We’re almost there. One of them is like a doctor, a chemist, or something. Hopefully, she can help Leah.”

“I probably should have asked this earlier, but you were kind of shutting down all my questions,” The Fixer said, staring out the window at the shops on the street. He didn’t seem particularly perplexed by the erotic toys store or the tattoo parlors or even the Jamba Juice, but he did raise an eyebrow as they passed the sketchy video rental store. “Do people even rent videos anymore?”

“What?”

“I meant, where exactly are we going?”

“Oh. Met some people who fancy themselves ghost hunters. Unless you’ve got a better place to go, some other people who might be able to fix you up, then these guys are our best bet. They’ve been helping me out while I was trying to investigate you.”

“Ghost hunters?”

“Yep. Ghosts are real. Who knew? Even seanced one trying to figure out if Leah was even still alive,” Erika said with a sharp note in her tone, even as she wondered if she should mention the name the ghost gave: The Former Fixer.

Leah’s predecessor?

With context, that made much more sense now than it had before. Still fucked, but at least some pieces were falling into place.

The Fixer let out a long sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. We should have said something. We just thought—”

“That nobody would notice? The first thing you did was muck about with Carter’s clocks, and you thought we wouldn’t figure it out?” Erika scoffed.

“That was Leah. She was so excited to finally understand after years of just seeing you and Carter do things that she couldn’t believe were real.”

Erika let out a low groan. She wanted to be angry, but that sounded a lot like her mother. Her real mother. She always got too giddy over little things.

“So these ghost hunters figured out who I was? And the Caligari classification system? They’re all regular humans?”

“As far as I know. One has a weird sword.” She pulled around behind the arcade, stopping the truck in the cramped parking lot. All the other cars were present, including Anna’s motorcycle. “Ah, but they didn’t really figure out who you are. Or the… ‘system’. I was a bit cagy about all that with them. I learned it after breaking into an old church and finding all kinds of juicy information about you in their archives… then I got chased out by Murder Drone and Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s deadbeat uncle.”

The Fixer tensed, whipping his head toward her. “Erika…”

“They might have put a bounty on my head.”

The Fixer pressed his index fingers to his temples and started massaging in a circular motion. “Erika…”

“And then I impersonated you to them to get a bit further into all this supernatural nonsense. Hope they didn’t figure that one out.”

“They did. They definitely did. Those people know everything. Like I exist to track down The Mummy, The Analyst exists to catalogue and dissect all information related to her domain—Chicago, currently.”

“Except they don’t know about The Mummy.”

“Well… yes. But The Mummy has been hiding from everyone for thousands of years. If not for me, they would likely still be unknown. You certainly have not been trying to hide yourself, let alone succeeding at it.”

“Sorry,” Erika said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Someone just told me not to let other people know about my powers. They could have mentioned that there were people out there wanting to burn our house down if they found out, but they didn’t. They could have said that body-snatching my mother was some kinky sex agreement from before I was born, but they didn’t. They could have talked about the supernatural—”

“Alright,” The Fixer sighed. “I understand. You’re not entirely to blame… And it wasn’t a sex thing.”

Erika glared, but sighed. “Carter’s inside. I don’t think he should see Leah all… hooked. Especially that one in her—your?—eye. So, unless you can just Fixer all that up, it might be best if you stay like this until I get him away.”

The Fixer shook his head. “Those chains were designed to contain me. Not being anchored to the larger mass, I am able to switch states, but fixing myself is out of the question until they are removed.”

“Then stay like this for now,” Erika said, kicking open her door. “Let’s go introduce you to Carter and The Hunters.”