THE SILVER AND THE BLACK

By Steve Seinberg and Meriades Rai

An uncharted island in the Maluku province of Indonesia
Five Days Ago…

Five men lay dead and six more were well on their way to joining them. It was a decent haul but it wasn’t perfect; one member of the Indonesian cult known as the Sacred Sons of Nakula had slipped the net, and that spelled trouble for the sultry Egyptian woman whose fatal touch had accounted for the other eleven.

“Apologies, darling,” Cleo Nefertiti reported into her Bluetooth mouthpiece. “Looks like my dance didn’t take with the entire audience.”

“No worries, honeybunch. I got enough of a head start, so anyone reckoning on a hot pursuit will need a jet pack to catch up with me…”

Cleo smiled at the familiar voice echoing in her earpiece, then froze abruptly as she glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye. The cloister chamber she was standing in wasn’t overly large but it was flanked on its two longest walls by parallel sequences of marble pillars, and each of these lines of columns cast bands of shadow like zebra striping up and down the courtyard. There was plenty of darkness to keep an enemy hidden – provided they had the sense to remain still. Unfortunately for the individual in question, he was unaware that the Egyptian woman’s eyesight was every bit as clinical as her skill as an assassin.

Cleo slid quickly and silently between the stippled shadows, a flash of darkly tanned skin sheathed in a slender shift of white cotton. Her feet were bare, her pad stealthy as a desert fox; boned like a saint with the consciousness of a snake. The last of the twelve Sacred Sons didn’t stand a chance.

Cleo caught the man attempting to slip through a narrow aperture in the far wall, a secret doorway accessed by the palming of a lockstone. The cultist didn’t hear her approach but he was suddenly aware of her anyway, an uncanny level of intuition that might have served him well in other circumstances. He whirled, sliding a dagger from his robes… but his adversary was already upon him, curling one thin arm about his throat and splaying her other palm inches from his face.

“You didn’t like my dance?” Cleo hissed in the man’s ear. “I was under the impression it affected all men; once I entrance them with the hypnotic sway of my hips, my breasts, my hair, they remain paralyzed for a time, long enough for me to deliver my venomous caress. It certainly worked on your friends. But you’re different. I wonder, immune as you are to my charms, are you also impervious to my touch of death…?”

The man dropped his knife, his heart in his throat.

“Please. Please! Don’t kill me. I won’t tell a soul you were here, I won’t try to stop you—”

Cleo closed her hand about the man’s face and then tightened her arm about his neck as a sweet, milky venom flowed from her palm and her victim began to choke and thrash and squeal. She showed a surprising strength, considering her slight build. She held on for a good two or three minutes, until her toxin had been fully absorbed and the man’s innards had begun to liquefy.

“There,” she whispered, smiling. “Question answered.”

She let the man fall. He was dead in every sense that mattered but his rapidly blackening body continued to twitch. That made twelve.

“Problem solved, darling,” Cleo reported, curling a delicate finger to the mouthpiece at her dark, cinnabar-stained lips. “As I’ve always said, you can rely on the Asp, yes? Sweetheart?Jalome…?”

There was no answer in her ear.

Cleo Nefertiti, the Asp, paled as she strode out into the center of the cloister yard, staring up through the open stone roof at the cerulean sky high overhead. Somewhere up there a helicopter waited to collect her and her partner – and the prize they’d traveled to this remote volcanic island to obtain – and then whisk them back to the mainland. She’d fulfilled her role, dealing with the Sacred Sons, the cult that had guarded the White Labyrinth for countless generations. Now it was all up to her companion, a man of many skills and not just in the finer arts of thievery. Jalome Beacher was also her lover… and her friend.

“Blessed be, darling,” the Asp whispered. “Just come back to me in one piece, you hear…?”

Jalome Beacher – the villain, rogue and thief extraordinaire otherwise known as Slyde – was a heartbeat and half an inch away from being separated into two equal bodily portions by a whirling steel blade when he finally shifted his weight and momentum into his right hip and began gliding along his nearside wall. The spinning blade screamed past him, close enough to make him wince as he pulled his head clear; as it was, it clipped the thinnest edge of his Bluetooth headset and tore it away, reducing it to fine wires and plastic powder before he even realized that he’d lost it, and his contact with his partner along with it.

Jalome cursed. Still, it could have been much worse. If he’d timed his momentum shift incorrectly or misjudged his angle and rate of acceleration, that would have been his entire upper torso shredded back there…

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…. don’t think about it, don’t throw up… just keep sw—eep!”

The ground lurched suddenly and Jalome screamed like a girl as a gaping chasm opened beneath him. He jumped at the last moment, twisting his body in mid-flight as the opposite wall then detached from its foundations and began to rotate, cutting off his forward path in all but the narrowest orifice. He shot through the gap with a shimmy of the hips, instinctively breathing inwards even though he knew that wouldn’t prevent him from being crushed flatter than a sheet of photocopy paper if he miscalculated his velocity…

The White Labyrinth was an ingenious construct; a pain in the proverbial, yes, but ingenious nonetheless. It operated on some manner of fiendishly clever geomechanical principle of balanced weights and rotating segments, which was devilish enough, but when one considered the sheer scale of the operation it boggled the mind. The Labyrinth was, to break it down in the bluntest terms, a subterranean vault the size of a modest shopping mall constructed roughly in the shape of a sphere, but made up of revolving circular ‘pieces’ containing a network of corridors, chutes and channels, all constantly interweaving and dissecting and changing dimensions at regular intervals. It was an enormous, three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube-cum-jigsaw puzzle; a jigsaw puzzle with deathtraps, such as whirling blades that could slice a man in two.

“Come on, Jalome… speed is the game in the shadow of kings, and all that…”

Jalome had stolen the architectural blueprints to the Labyrinth and studied them for six weeks before attempting to raid the place, and he’d still got himself lost within ten minutes of entering. Now he was surviving on his wits, and on the unique capabilities that had seen him hired for this job in the first place: his skills as Slyde.

A talented chemist, Jalome Beacher had previously developed an experimental friction-resistant compound that would have revolutionized the non-stick coating industry and earned him a small personal fortune had the company he’d been working for not attempted to steal his ideas and claim them for their own. Jalome had subsequently absconded with his formula and applied his compound to the surface of a special silver and white padded bodysuit, similar to those worn by speed skaters. Thoroughly disgusted by the way he’d been treated by his previous employers, as well as by the apathetic authorities and legal system when he’d attempted to resolve the felony through the courts, he’d then forged a new career as a thief and criminal. The sensational Slyde was quick, slick and slippery, all but impossible to catch even when faced with the likes of Spider-Man…

…and thus the enigmatic Vera Gêmeos had leased the services of the right man – as well as his present girlfriend and partner-in-crime – for this particular heist.

Slyde hurtled along a telescopic tunnel at incredible speed, virtually untouched by air friction and gliding over the floor as if skating on an invisible sheen of oil. He was all too aware that the dimensions of the corridor were shrinking rapidly, the walls and ceiling retracting with a tessellated snail-shell spiral effect far into the distance, but to slow down – to think, instead of relying on instinct – would mean death. Spying a revolving aperture to his left, he breathed deeply and shifted his weight into the opposite hip, skimming sideways at exactly the right moment…

…and shooting out into a strange nothingness, an area with no identifying features and lit from all directions at once by a soft, white, phosphorescent glow that emanated from the walls. This chamber was perfectly spherical and rotating so quickly that it almost created a weightless anti-gravity state. Slyde slithered about the spinning interior circumference without due concern, his helmet equipped with special apparatus to automatically compensate for equilibrium displacement – vertigo – without affecting his balance and vision. It was as if the White Labyrinth had been designed solely with him and his unique abilities in mind… or that he existed for the sake of the Labyrinth.

This was the core. This was his intended destination. This was where the prize should be. So where…?

Slyde held his breath, his eyes narrowing behind the goggles of his mask.

There. At the heart of the core chamber was the barest glint of a reflection, created by the shine of his own body. It was a mirrored ball, perfectly weighted to exist in perpetual levitating motion, rendering its contents practically invisible. But he’d seen it. And now, reaching his gloved hand inside and gripping with the special raised pads on his otherwise frictionless fingertips, he claimed his treasure.

A white key – or, to be more precise, half a key.

Jalome Beacher smiled in satisfaction. God, he was good. If he still had his Bluetooth he’d let Cleo tell him how good. But that was for later.

For now there was just the simple task of getting back out of the Labyrinth the same way he’d got in…

Los Angeles, California
Four Nights Ago…

Sometimes, the man in black was just a voice whispering from the shadows…

“You there,” he’d said, four nights past. He was hailing a dapper, frightening visitor to the city, a forbidding-looking Native American gentleman, as well as the woman who appeared to be the frightening visitor’s driver, a tall woman in a high-collared jacket that appeared specifically tailored to obscure her face. Neither of the pair was at all what they might have seemed at first glance, and there was no legitimate reason for their black limousine to be parked there in a small, disused car lot in this district of town. They both radiated a nearly palpable sense of menace, but the man in black was no stranger to that. When he spoke, he was a scarcely heard ghost of a voice, a string of whispers and sighs nearly dashed by the Santa Ana winds… but the two visitors both had ears to shame the finest sentries, and they had no difficulties in hearing him.

“This is my city,” the man in black admonished. “What brings you here without invitation…?” His words issued forth from several distinct points at once, all of them dark…frustratingly dark to the watchful pair that the hidden man addressed: if anything, their eyesight was even keener than their hearing, yet neither could penetrate the shadows that pooled like ink all around the edges of the small and otherwise deserted parking lot they had been examining.

The Native American man took a single step toward the center of the lot, turning his head slowly about in several directions as he replied. His dark eyes were narrowed and he seemed to be sniffing the air. “Some party from your city has encroached upon one of my cities,” he said, more than a trace of a snarl informing his words, “I regard that as invitation enough. Now I’m here seeking the source of that intrusion.”

“One of your cities…?” The man in black could almost have been an echo of the Native American man’s own words, or a memory, so faint was he.

“Albuquerque, in this instance. Perhaps you know something of this.” Light from a street-lamp rising up on the opposite side of the road from the lot’s fenced perimeter cast a chain-link shadow across the asphalt, making it seem as if the man and his driver stood on some strange sort of otherworldly game-board.

“Perhaps. But you misunderstand the situation. Leave this matter to those more properly informed,” the man in black told the frightening visitor, the driver bristling, scanning the lot’s periphery in vain… “It will be addressed. Go home…”

“Show yourself,” answered the Native American man, the snarl even more pronounced, “and explain more fully; otherwise we continue our search.”

“Go home…” the man in black repeated a final time, but he knew the pair would never give up their hunt so easily…

And so it proved: two nights later, and the man in black had spied the strange pair of visitors again. This time, they were moving on foot through the wooded hills above Hollywood as easily as if born and raised there, approaching a fairly lavish house perched above them. The house seemed to invite collapse in its very construct, half-perched as it was out above a rather sheer drop-off, with only a collection of what were essentially strategically placed stilts to keep it aloft. The Native American man indicated the thin-looking supports with a wave of one hand to his driver, and, intriguingly, the silvery moonlight gleamed off of a set of fearsome-looking talons as he gestured. He seemed to be conveying the thought that with very little effort, the stilts could be convinced to forsake their duty if necessary, thereby sending the fairly lavish house above tumbling recklessly down the hillside. His hand, as he drew it back, passed through another swatch of light, revealing a covering of tawny-colored fur. His driver nodded casually, as though removal by hand of support beams bearing several tons would be a simple matter for either of them…

…and the man in black felt obliged to intercede.

“You should have left this place. Your efforts only complicate things.”

“Ah, our friend from the shadows.” The frightening visitor had lost none of his snarl in the past two days. “We have made progress in our search. The owner of the house above us is involved in the intrusion I spoke of the other night. I have found that decisive negative reinforcement is the most effective response in situations such as these.”

“I say again: you misunderstand the situation. Your actions here will only destroy the trail.”

“Says the unknown, disembodied voice.”

“There,” said the driver. She stepped toward her frightening employer as she spoke, pointing to one side, and as she did, a pale wash of moonlight spilled down through the lattice of tree branches above them to glance off of what seemed to be a metallic sort of plate set across almost her entire face. She was indicating a patch of otherwise unremarkable ground that seemed to be playing host to more shadows than should have rightfully been there.

As the two strange companions watched, more shadows seemed to flow across the sloping ground, converging on that spot, building themselves into a mass that rose up from the earth to approximate a manlike shape before them. The voice of the man in black came whispering forth from this spectral, three-dimensional silhouette:

“I see you won’t be stopped. Leave off for the moment, and let me investigate a bit further. This is my city, and I know it well. Meet with me two nights from now, and I’ll share all I know.”

“A construct of shadows.” The frightening visitor sounded almost approving. “An interesting trick… but not enough to prod me toward restraint. I am not a man who takes kindly to trespass. You’ll have to do better than this.”

“Then perhaps my name? I am called the Shroud,” whispered the man in black from wherever he actually, physically then resided. “As I said, this is my city. And I hold similar views toward trespass – fortunately for you, I understand what brings you here, and I will make some allowance in this case.”

“Golly – lucky us,” said the frightening visitor’s driver, more glints of metal winking in the moonlight all up and down her person, as though she might be fully armored beneath her long coat.

Her employer held up one hand to stay her sarcasm, and he took a step toward the shadow-construct. “I know of you,” he told the inky thing standing before him. “You are a man of no small reputation.”

“I might say the same of you, Thomas Fireheart. Or in this guise, perhaps you prefer to be addressed by your other name…?”

The frightening visitor stepped forward again, the snarl becoming a more active thing rather than an ominous undercurrent, the gentle moonlight now playing upon him in full, revealing a feline visage, all cat’s eyes and fangs, an angry vertical scar splitting the rich fur of his brow and his cheek on the right-hand side of his face. “I am the Puma,” he said with a tone of warning.

“Yes. And your associate is a Miss Cylla Markham, also called Scylla: your driver and pilot, and sometimes your soldier.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I told you: this is my city. I know everything here that I choose to know. Two days…Puma.”

The cat-man was clearly not pleased, and his driver seemed poised to add a snarl of her own to her employer’s, but the Puma made his decision. “If you break your word to me, Shroud, I promise you I will find ways to make even shadows bleed, and then we will meet again. And you know I will not apologize.”

The shadow-shape seemed to throb ever so slightly in the night, but it said nothing.

“Fine. Two days, then,” agreed the Puma. “Where and when?”

The man in black – the Shroud – whispered a bit more, and then he released his hold on the construct of shadows that had been serving as his proxy, and it dissipated like a dream upon waking.

The frightening visitor growled one final time at the spot where it had stood, and then he started back down the hillside.

“He cast a grim shadow,” decided Cylla Markham aloud, her faceplate glittering in the light of the moon, her tone one of approval.

Casting a last dire glance up at the unsuspecting house on stilts above them, the frightening visitor motioned for his driver to follow him, and then they, too, were gone…

Symkaria
Two Days Ago…

“I’m sorry, Miss Gêmeos,” Silver Sablinova informed the darkly striking woman standing in the doorway to her office, “but your timing is atrocious. I’m already late for a tedious but nonetheless essential appointment with the Symkarian consulate regarding the recent assassination attempt on our beloved Prince Stefan, and – as my overly officious cousin and self-declared personal advisor Anna would attest – I can’t be interrupting my schedule for the sake of any stranger wandering in off the street and knocking on the door of my private agency. So, if you’d be so kind as to—”

“Josef Voltmar Schwartz.”

The mention of the name stilled Silver in mid-step, her coltish figure artfully embellished by bands of sunlight and shadow as she passed before a window splintered with a bamboo Venetian blind. Honey tinted in her platinum blonde hair and touched the lightly tanned skin of her face and throat, framed by the starched V of a high-collared ivory blouse. Her eyes were pale, her lips paler still. She wore drainpipe jeans, stonewashed, and very high heels, white. There was a revolver holstered at her hip. Her perfume was expensive and sophisticated, and so was she.

Silver deliberated a moment, studying the woman in the doorway across from her, then slipped a slim cell phone from her jeans pocket and dialed.

“Anna?” she said, her voice husky with a Balkan accent pitched somewhere between Russian and Romanian. “Give me ten minutes. Something’s come up.”

A faint squawk of animated reply erupted from the cell but Silver swiftly disengaged and then switched the phone to silent for good measure. She then smoothed back a lock of hair and eyed her visitor shrewdly, her hand resting easily at her waist, just an inch from the hip with the gun.

“I’m listening,” she said.

The woman who had introduced herself as Vera Gêmeos now stepped forward, and accepted a seat when offered. She was mid-height, buxom yet graceful, dark brunette, reticent. Down on her luck but determined to the make the best of her lot. Good shoes, but cheap. Tasteful skirt, jacket. Demure blouse. No visible jewelry, although there was a suggestion of a chain at her throat. Tired eyes. Nervous hands. Silver collated this information silently, waiting for the woman to speak again, but the truth was she was far more interested in Josef Schwartz than Vera Gêmeos.

“Schwartz was a young guard at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp between the years 1942 and 1944,” Miss Gêmeos began. “Natzweiler specialized in mustard gas experiments among other atrocities, and Schwartz was a willing participant in the horror, becoming a favorite of SS-Obersturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein. After the war the majority of the Natweiler butchers were either killed outright or put on trial to be hanged, but Schwartz was never apprehended.”

Silver nodded but said nothing. She knew all this already, having spent most of her adult life hunting down war criminals of Nazi affiliation and otherwise – exhaustive knowledge and mad preparation were the only options when trying to stay one step ahead of the devil.

“Schwartz earned a measure of notoriety two decades later when he resurfaced briefly in Argentina,” Miss Gêmeos continued. “He’d become something of a collector, a dealer in artifacts and curios of a certain nature – the mystic, the esoteric, often Satanic, almost always illicit. Rumor has it that he’d mastered a certain level of magical expertise, enough to keep him young and healthy and to attract a devoted wife named Isidora, though such gossip can’t be substantiated. Schwartz was generally clever enough to remain clandestine in his business, although on this one occasion he was implicated in the murder of two Jewish-American secret service operatives. There was also a suggestion he’d committed murder to obtain some item or other that had been previously denied him. The next time his name was mentioned in any specific context was some forty years later, in 2004, when his skeletal remains were reported to have been discovered in a light aircraft crash in Guatemala. He was identified by his personal effects.”

Silver leaned forward on her toes, her eyes bright. She was making no attempt to hide her interest now. “But…?”

“But. I have off-the-record confirmation that the body that was discovered did not belong to Josef Schwartz,” Miss Gêmeos said, softly. She paused, fishing a pack of cigarettes from the handbag in her lap and lighting one. She met Silver’s gaze coolly, her earlier nervousness fading now that the other woman was obviously hooked.

“Schwartz is alive, and – again, reportedly – still extraordinarily and unnaturally healthy for his age,” she said, through a lazy curl of smoke. “I know his present location, a private island stronghold where he and his wife have resided, undetected, for over sixty years, surrounded by his collection of arcane artifacts. And I know how much you’d be interested in apprehending him, both in your role as a hunter of absconded war criminals, and because Schwartz’s name was once mentioned in conjunction with the open case of a quartet of bronze figurines, lost during the looting of Symkaria’s royal treasure house in the war and the country’s occupation by Nazi forces.”

Slatted sunlight and shadow still feathered Silver’s curvaceous silhouette as she stepped forward, the heel of her hand now resting on the jut of her revolver.

“Presuming I believe you,” she murmured, “am I also to infer that you’re offering me information in exchange for… what, exactly?”

“A different artifact, also reported to be in Schwartz’s possession. I don’t care about the man himself; you can execute him or haul him in for trial at your leisure. And you can do what you want with the rest of his collection, as I’m sure your country isn’t the only one that would like its looted riches returned. But there’s one item I want. A key. Or, to be more precise, half of a key – to be reunited with the half I already own.”

Vera Gêmeos’ hand moved to her throat, and to the unseen necklace beneath the collar of her blouse that Silver had casually noted earlier. Silver inclined her head.

“A key to what?” she asked.

“My freedom,” Miss Gêmeos said, softly. And there was a sincerity in her expression then that couldn’t be denied; regardless of the accuracy of what she’d declared, and of the importance of anything she may not have said, this final statement was utterly heartfelt.

Silver Sable pursed her lips. “You’ll give me Schwartz’s location?”

“Yes. But I have a condition.”

“Of course you do.”

Miss Gêmeos smiled thinly. She returned to the same bag where she kept her cigarettes and this time produced a manila document folder, which she then handed to Silver. “I have an operative on retainer,” she said. “Well, two actually; the man in question insists his girlfriend be included in any deal we make. In fairness both have recently proved their worth to me, and also shown they can be trusted. I want them to accompany you on this venture.”

Silver glanced at the uppermost sheet inside the folder and snorted. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she declared. “Slyde and the Asp…?”

“You’ve worked with costumed agents of dubious moral character before.”

Silver grimaced. That was true enough.

“You’ll also find an encrypted satellite map log in that file. Slyde will hand over the decryption code when he joins you. And, just in case you find yourself inclined to betray my trust, I’ve also included photographs depicting the fate of the last unfortunates to fall foul of the Asp’s… unique charms.”

Silver skimmed through a half-dozen images, each capturing in lurid detail the extreme physical deterioration of several interchangeable Indonesian men in white ceremonial robes. Dead men. Very, very dead.

“How tasteful,” she purred. “But threats aren’t necessary. There’ll be no treachery on my account, I’m a woman of my word.”

“So I’ve heard. That’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen to hire you.”

“Do you have any objection to me bringing an agent of my own in on this?” Silver asked, after a moment’s deliberation, and after her client had risen from her chair and returned to the doorway on the other side of the office.

“Whatever you want, Miss Sable,” Vera Gêmeos murmured, barely glancing back. “So long as I get that key.”

Silver said nothing more, watching the mysterious woman depart, then pursed her lips as she weighted her cell phone in her hand. Josef Schwartz. Well, well…

Making her decision, she scrolled through the contacts on her cell and dialed. When a man’s deep voice eventually answered, Silver breathed deeply.

“Hello, Jack. I’ve got a proposition for you…”

New York City, New York
Two Nights Ago…

The man was sitting naked at the window of his darkened hotel room, staring down onto the rain-soaked street below, when his cell phone rang. It was so long since anyone had called him – since any kind of contact with someone who wasn’t a stranger – that, at first, he didn’t even recognize the sound. He merely frowned into the driving rain, and the reflected neon fairy dust of signs proclaiming enough sleazy strip joints and bars to line the thoroughfares of hell itself, until eventually he realized that the incessant ringing was emanating from the pocket of his worn-out duffel bag, slung about the post at the foot of his ten-dollar-a-night bed.

The man stood, tall and broad across the chest, his shoulders and back lined with a soft down the same fiery russet coloring of his hair and his swarthy, stubbled jaw. His eyes were sunken, his mouth surly. In his hand there was a three-quarters-empty bottle of bourbon. Neon licked along the ridges of his muscles, but otherwise he was nothing more than a hard, heavy silhouette. He exuded an animal smell, tainted with sour liquor.

He listened to the phone, scowling as he wondered who the hell still cared if he was alive – especially at 3am, damn it. Not that he was much one for sleeping. Too wild to care, you got that animal stare, you got stay anywhere in your eyes…

The man crossed the room and fished his cell from his bag, regarding it suspiciously. His eyes were a hot, hot amber in the shadows. He sniffed, then answered.

“Hello, Jack,” a woman said immediately, in a seductive voice rich with a familiar Eastern European cadence. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

Sable…? Jack Russell paused, glancing down at the bottle in his fist and then out of the window into the driving rain and relentless neon sin of the night.

“Yeah?” he said, gruffly. “Well then, I’m listening…”

Los Angeles, California
Tonight …

A girl so strange, I lost my head
Lost it all, got left for dead
I curse the day now, just a shell
A Fallen Angel…

It was part of a song that Thomas Fireheart had overheard his employee, Cylla Markham, singing softly to herself on more than one occasion. Fireheart was neither one to pry into the possibly messy emotional backgrounds of his people, nor one to even express much interest in them at all – he felt it showed a kind of weakness, and it also invited possible complications into such relationships. He preferred a bit of distance, and found it to be an almost universally effective approach. Still, something about the song seemed so on point where Cylla was concerned, given her history, that he wondered if it was something she had written herself.

He was quite happy to drop the matter from his thoughts, however, when the mysterious man in black finally appeared, the man called the Shroud, materializing purposefully out of the darkness the way Fireheart himself liked to stride into boardroom meetings: I’m here; now we may begin…

“Well, well,” said the forbidding cat-man also known as the Puma, “not just a voice from the shadows after all – you actually are a man. And a man of your word, at that. I trust you’ve come to share your knowledge as promised, yes?”

The Shroud nodded his agreement. “I said that I would. I have an ally working with me in this matter, and he will be joining us, but perhaps we can begin without him.”

The Puma nodded his assent. His eyes remained fixed on the Shroud, while his companion, the woman called Scylla, seemed more disposed to allowing hers to roam about the environs, never stopping for too long in any one place. As it had seemed two nights past in the hills, the person of Cylla Markham was indeed almost entirely concealed beneath a sheath of form-fitting gold metal, like an armored bodysuit. She still wore the matching metal faceplate, red eyes glowing through slits in its surface, only her mouth and chin visible beneath it and her flowing blonde hair bursting forth from above it; the rest of her features were hidden away behind its cold embrace.

“I first want to inform you that you and I are investigating the same problem, albeit from separate directions. That problem is of course this new designer drug that’s been appearing on the streets here in Los Angeles, and as you said, in your own Albuquerque as well. I gather that you understand the effects of this drug.”

It was Cylla Markham who spoke up, agitated: “Basically, it turns people into low-rent versions of vampires for a couple of hours.”

Her employer cocked an eyebrow at her, although whether in amusement or annoyance, it was impossible to tell. “Yes, that,” he agreed. “More or less. Like Mutant Growth Hormone, this new drug grants its users abilities not normally at their disposal, and like Mutant Growth Hormone, its effects are variable, of limited duration, are sometimes harmful or even fatal to the user, and can also result in considerable danger to those nearby. Some of my own people were caught up in an ugly incident involving a sizable cache of the drug. There were casualties.”

“I am aware,” the Shroud assured him.

“You said that I misunderstood the situation,” the Puma demanded, apparently as interested in this point as he was in the overall investigation. “How so?”

“You were told that the drug has its largest presence here in Los Angeles, and so you assumed this must also be where the drug is being manufactured. This is your mistake. It is true that it actually was created here, I’ve learned, by a deranged and discredited physician named Karl Malus, but it’s being produced elsewhere – in Mexico, to be more specific, not far from the Texas border, near El Paso. Los Angeles represents the drug’s largest area of demand so far, not its source of supply. If you want to dismantle the operation, you’ve traveled to the wrong end of the food chain.”

“So the product is shipped into the country through Texas…?”

“Yes. And then driven west along Interstate 10, through New Mexico and Arizona, which comprise your territory, and on into Los Angeles… which is mine. The owner of the house you were about to destroy the other night is just a local retailer, not one of the operation’s prime movers. Killing him would have done nothing to the supply, and would have only alerted the real powers behind the drug that someone was after them.”

“Have you learned anything about the distribution into Albuquerque? The incidents that drew my attention?”

“Yes. My associate extracted certain relevant information from one of the men working to distribute the drug – I suspect you might actually approve of his methods.”

“And? What did he learn?”

“That the distribution into Albuquerque was done without sanction from whoever it is that’s running the overall operation. A lower-level employee got ambitious, made off with a generous helping of the product, and tried to unload it all by himself. As you saw, he wasn’t quite up to the task, and things got beyond his control.”

“That’s one way to put it,” said Cylla Markham. “Half a dozen users dead from the drug directly, another half-dozen people torn into chum by whacked-out Serum-heads, about a dozen more in the hospital all maimed and traumatized from attacks. Physically, they survived… but mentally…?”

“Yes, ‘Serum.’ That was the name Malus gave his creation, and it apparently stuck.”

“It sure did,” Scylla agreed, “and the ‘Twilight’ crowd is slurping it up like soda-pop – price and consequences be damned.”

Something suddenly flashed by overhead, slicing the night air like a kite, and then it landed in the tall grass that bordered the grounds of the empty storage facility that the Shroud had chosen as their meeting place.

A manlike shape rose up from its landing crouch, and then strode toward them. As the figure drew nearer to the glow of the lights affixed to the corrugated sides of the storage facility’s long buildings, and its features began to resolve themselves for the onlookers, the Shroud heard an increasingly familiar snarl. Only after Scylla was already past him and hurtling at the newcomer did the Shroud realize that the snarl had come from her this time, and not from the Puma.

“No!” he yelled at her, but she was already upon the new arrival.

As fast as Scylla was, however, the man who had just plunged down out of the sky was a match for her, pivoting neatly as she came on, taking hold of one metal-encased arm, and using her own momentum as well as his considerable strength to hurl her away beyond him, where she crashed hard into the side of one of the buildings.

She was on her feet almost instantly, the building clearly having gotten the worst of the exchange, and she was in motion again.

“Fireheart, stop her!” the Shroud ordered.

The Puma folded his arms across his broad chest, cocking an expressive eyebrow at the cloaked man in black. He was very obviously not a person found often on the receiving end of a command.

“If you want my help, and my information,” the Shroud warned, “you need to rein her in. If you can’t keep your own house in order, I won’t be letting you into mine.”

The Puma uncrossed his arms, but still hesitated, while Cylla Markham again went careening involuntarily through the air, her own apparent rage clouding her fighting skills and judgment.

“I mean it: I’ll go to Mexico without you. No direct vengeance for you or your people.”

The snarl again, and then: “Scylla! Enough!”

“But he’s–”

“I know. But our new friend here insists. Perhaps he can explain…?”

The Shroud nodded, and Scylla very, very reluctantly backed up toward her employer, allowing the fourth person to return again toward the lighted area where the rest of them congregated.

The man approached now, breathing easily despite his exertions against Scylla. At first he was little more than the kind of black shadow-shape that the Shroud might have created, one rather lean and agile-looking… and then the light began to illuminate details of his appearance: long black hair swept straight back from a cruel-looking widow’s peak… glowing eyes as red as Cylla Markham’s…a thick black sprout of beard on his chin, and the rest of his angular face clean-shaven, his skin as pale as the moonlight… pointed ears and a nose upturned like a bat’s.

“Is he a Serum user?” asked the Puma, in a rare showing of uncertainty. “Something about his scent seems similar, but…”

“He’s no Serum-head,” declared Scylla. “He’s one of them for real. He’s a stinking, bloodsucking vampire.” She held up her hands, balled into golden, armored fists, and then flexed them. Twin golden spikes appeared, thrusting forward, one from the back of each wrist like stilettos, each looking eager for a skewering. “Explain this now, shadow-man… and do it fast, because I hate vampires.”

“This is the ally I mentioned,” the Shroud told them. “This is Dr. Michael Morbius. He’s a physician. His condition is the result of science, and medicine – attempts to cure a rare blood disease – it’s not supernatural in nature. Despite appearances, Dr. Morbius is not a vampire, not as you think of that term.”

“It looks like a vampire. It has fangs like a vampire. It stinks like a vampire. Does it drink blood and kill people?”

Dr. Morbius spoke for the first time, his voice dolorous and low, like the sound that might emerge if a graveyard could sigh. “I do,” he said. “Hell’s built on regret.”

“Then it’s gotta go…”

“Scylla, I said no!” The Puma interceded bodily. For the moment his strength or his authority, or the combination of both, seemed barely sufficient to hold back his employee… but barely. “Shroud, quickly now: explain!”

“As I said, Dr. Morbius contracted a rare disease. His experimental attempt at a cure turned him into this. His condition has some similarities to true vampirism, but it is not the same, and he is still trying to completely cure himself, so that he can be fully human again. He made the mistake of seeking help from less than reputable sources, though, in his desperation.”

“I see!” The Puma actually seemed cheered. “This doctor you spoke of, who created the Serum drug…”

“Karl Malus,” said Dr. Morbius, and suddenly his own red eyes seemed to emit a fury that dwarfed anything yet shown by either the Puma or Cylla Markham.

“Yes. Malus. So he used your blood to create the drug.”

“He did. And for that – among his other sins – he and I will have a reckoning.”

“So you understand?’ asked the Shroud. “Dr. Morbius is a victim here. His blood was used without his authorization or knowledge to create this Serum product. It’s Malus and his business associates who are the ones we all need to focus on here. Miss Markham – are you with us or not? Decide now – I won’t ask again. This is your one chance to be a part of erasing Serum from the world.”

“She is with us,” answered the Puma, glaring at his seething associate. “We are a part of this. Now tell us the rest of it, and then we need to begin formulating a plan of attack…”

The four extraordinary beings began to confer, and the shadows seemed to dance about them ever so slowly…

And so the man in black known as the Shroud was rather well acquainted with being a voice whispering from the shadows.

Less familiar to him – and much less welcome – was the sensation of being something resembling a mostly garden variety man in black, and having unknown voices whispering to himfrom the shadows. Regardless of his feelings on the matter, however, this had become a recurring phenomenon of late.

Heavy metal, black and silver
Falling matter of the sun
Folds itself into a place
Where there was never, never one…

He had made plans with Fireheart and Cylla Markham to meet the following evening to begin strategizing against the Serum operation, and he had then compared notes with Dr. Morbius, who was staying in the Shroud’s Los Angeles mansion for the time being… and after the grave scientist had retired to his quarters, the voices began to issue forth again from the shadows, the two of them that sounded akin, yet distinct, finishing each other’s sentences.

The colder and more even of the pair began: “You have completed gathering your–”

“–team together,” added the second, the one that modulated like singsong, a mess of various pitches and timbres and speeds and volumes. “Four of you: a lovely–”

“–symmetry. You can now act–” asserted the first voice, all implacable, stoic, almost robotic.

“–against our adversary. ‘Let the games begin…’” Amusement in the second voice? Eagerness?

“…as the humans would say.”

The Shroud squared his broad shoulders. His study boasted a skylight the size of a skating rink, and moonlight divided the room into firm zones of clear illumination and impenetrable darkness. “They will not like the prospect of delay. They are intent on the goal that the four of us share.”

“We understand. However–” The second voice sounded almost madcap as compared to the first.

“–we care not at all. Unless the larger quest is completed–” The first voice again, like a computer program emitting data.

“–there will be no smaller campaigns to win. We will not–”

“–allow it. Our adversary has made the first move. We have chosen you as our representative, and your team has formed–”

“–as we foretold. With our adversary halfway to victory, we have no time left–”

“–for starting anew. Convince them, man in black. Or…”

“…else…”

The Shroud frowned prodigiously – and this was something of note, given that his default expression was already rather frown-like. The others would not like this new revision to their shared agenda at all, but he understood that they were being given no choice but to alter their priorities as the voices demanded… now he just needed to make them understand it as well.

He went to rouse Dr. Morbius and to contact Thomas Fireheart and his associate, the fierce Cylla Markham, the twin voices chasing each other across his mind.

With our adversary halfway to victory…

Symkaria
Today…

Symkaria reminded Vera Gêmeos of Prague, Budapest, Vienna… that old world Eastern European chic, Gothic and Art Nouveau, a combination of elegance and decay in its architecture and its citizens alike. Not modern and Americanized like London or Berlin, or as youthful and culturally vibrant as Madrid or Rome. And untouched by the civil wars that had scarred Zagreb and Belgrade. This was a city-state of weathered bronze sculpture and cobblestone and wrought iron palisades, of bright courtyards and pretty gardens edged with dark, narrow buildings and even narrower streets, of alleyways and culverts and gas lamps…

…and it was a place of secrets.

Miss Gêmeos stood at a three-way intersection of tapered avenues, a lit cigarette cupped to her lips and her dark eyes shrewd as she studied the shadows gathering beneath an aged stone archway directly ahead of her. There were shapes shifting in the darkness, taller and thinner than men, with claws and wings and inhuman eyes. Creatures of the imagination, beasts that risked much to be abroad in daylight in this place of mortal flesh, they’d been following her for days now, long before her arrival in this particular corner of the Balkans… but they were assuredly drawing closer.

“You can’t harm me,” Miss Gêmeos whispered, touching her hand to the necklace beneath the collar of her blouse. “Not now, not any more. You ignored me all these years, believing me to be worthless. But now I’m halfway to freedom… and to vengeance. Tell him. Say, ‘You filled me with vengeance.‘ Say, ‘You planned to leave me cold… but you’ll never get your wish.‘ Tell him that, lackeys…”

“You belong to him, Gemini. To the Master. And you always shall.”

Vera Gêmeos – known in certain other circles by another, similar name – took one last drag on her cigarette then crushed it beneath the pointed toe of her shoe, exhaling a plume of silvery smoke that curled like a query mark above her head.

“Not all of me,” she said, coldly. “Only half. But I swear on everything I am and was and will be again… that will change. And then, Vera Gemini will rise anew…!”

NEXT: A sinister tableau on an island beach, in the crimson shadows of the setting sun… two separate gatherings, full of mistrust… and two reluctant coalitions destined to clash! The mystery of the Gemini Key deepens in Agents Of Gemini #2…