Previously in Agents Of Gemini…

In Symkaria, Silver Sable strikes a cautious deal with a mysterious new client Vera Gêmeos who promises to deliver the location of Josef Schwartz – a notorious Nazi war criminal – in return for a certain item in Schwartz’ possession: half of an arcane artifact known as the Gemini Key. At Gêmeos’ request Sable allies herself with criminal mercenaries Slyde and The Asp, who have already acted on Gêmeos’ behalf in retrieving the first half on the Key from a mechanical island deathtrap in Indonesia. She also recruits Jack Russell – the Werewolf – into her mission squad, knowing that Schwartz is a potentially dangerous adversary with access to a private collection of magical relics and weapons… including an alleged cure for Jack’s lycanthropic curse.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the vigilante Shroud encounters strangers in his city, in the form of Thomas Fireheart – the Puma – and his cyborg bodyguard Scylla. Fireheart is following the trail of a new, lethal designer drug known as Serum that has recently migrated from California to New Mexico, but Shroud will only agree to help Fireheart if Fireheart agrees to aid him in turn. Twin shadowy entities, their true identities presently unknown, have beseeched Shroud to secure the second half of the Gemini Key – and Puma, no stranger to spiritual portents, agrees to join Shroud in his mission. The one fly in the ointment is Shroud’s other ally and current houseguest, Dr Michael Morbius… a disagreeable companion for Puma and Scylla considering that the Serum drug they’re trying to eradicate afflicts its users with temporary pseudo-vampire powers, just like those Morbius possesses.

Unaware of each others’ intentions, these two separate teams converge upon a remote island in the South Pacific, and a sinister, displaced Baroque chateau that serves as Josef Schwartz’s jungle stronghold. They have no idea that they’re about to encounter one another – or that Schwartz is employing dark magicks to greet their arrival with a ghoulish army of his own creation…

WHEN THE BRINK OF RUIN LIES

By Meriades Rai

Plotted by Steve Seinberg and Meriades Rai

An unnamed island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, South Pacific Ocean, 600km off the coast of Chile

It was the German dramatic composer Richard Wagner who’d said ‘imagination creates reality’, so it was only fitting that Wagner’s music now filled the sickly gloom of the wide gallery, echoing among the pillars and archways and saturating the shadows with utter melancholy. However, Josef Schwartz’s preference wasn’t the traditional, bombastic sweep of The Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre; this was Liebestod, the final aria from Tristan und Isolde, and it spoke of death and finality, the murmuring of hearts set to eternal sleep. Wagner had also said ‘joy is not in things; it is in us’, but Josef had long since become a stranger to true joy, from the moment his own beloved wife Isidora had been taken from him.

And these things he created… no, there was no joy in them either.

Josef sat in the middle of the floor, stripped to the waist, his tanned skin slick with a sheen of sweat. His handsome features – clean, sharp, golden – were beginning to quaver, flaking like pastry crust as he concentrated the insidious magical residue flowing through him towards an objective other than damming the tide of age. Josef was eighty years old in actuality, but the magic allowed him youth; when he channeled that power into his creations instead, his own body suffered.

But it would be worth it. Once he’d birthed his army of guardsmen, and this army had taken care of the interlopers who’d dared set foot upon his island, then he could concentrate on his own well-being once more… and, of course, on his singular pursuit of restoring Isidora to life.

Josef smiled thinly through the pain, and all about him the magic rose and fell and in time to the sweeping sorrow of Wagner’s elegy. Throughout the gallery, hundreds of arcane artifacts of all sizes and descriptions trembled and rattled and shuddered and hissed, their power flowing from one to another and then to yet another in a dancing circuit. One of those artifacts was a Key – or, to be precise, half a Key. The Gemini Key. But, in truth, Josef Schwartz had no understanding that it was this article above all others that had drawn invaders to his doorstep, for to him it was just another source of mystic energy.

For now, all Josef cared about was creation: the creation of reality through imagination…

Arise. Arise!

And so they came, from the island beaches now moonlit black beneath the night skies, and from the jungle. Twisted concoctions, amalgams of anything and everything to hand: splinters of driftwood and bark, fistfuls of kelp, a castanet clatter of barnacled shells, desiccated husks of crabs and oyster, all tied and strangled and trussed in vines and leathery fern leaves.

Golems of wood, leaf and shell. Unthinking, unspeaking, unliving. Animated by magic and conscripted into service at Josef Schwartz’s command.

They rose and they came, shambling hulks, tripping and slithering towards the chateau hidden among the trees, and they swarmed upon those who now trespassed in their master’s sanctuary…

“You’re here for the Gemini Key, aren’t you?” the man in black whispered. Silver Sable scowled.

Maximillian Coleridge, The Shroud, was the very personification of mystery; his personal motivations were ambiguous to say the least and the powers at his command even more intriguingly obscure. He was certainly gifted with an enhanced sensory perception, Silver knew, an ability that compensated for a cruel, mystical blindness that had been inflicted upon him by the Cult of Kali many years before. It was also highly likely that he was attuned to general magical ‘frequencies’, the kind that permeated this godforsaken chateau like some toxic ore – and, like Silver, he inevitably possessed a keen intellect, one that prompted him to coolly analyze this potential powderkeg of a situation while others preened in hostility.

However, Shroud needed no precognitive talent to gauge this state of affairs. Neither did Silver. They shared a distrust of coincidence, and thus it was plain to the both of them that their opposing number was present, here and now at this precise place and time, for an identical reason. The Key.

Silver surreptitiously pressed a touch-switch in the palm of her glove, operating a miniature bluetooth mouthpiece. “Slyde,” she breathed. “Whatever happens next, you have one commission only: the Key half. Understood?”

Standing a short way behind Silver, at the rear of the group, Jalome Beacher hesitated at the command in his earpiece. He cast a sideways glance towards Cleo Nefertiti – his girlfriend, the Asp – and stifled a protest. He knew Cleo could take care of herself; hell, she was ten times more dangerous than Slyde could ever dream of being; but these were desperately unusual circumstances, to put it mildly. And something else was bothering him. Cleo had just recognized one member of the group who’d appeared at the opposite end of the passageway they’d been walking down. She’d called him Michael. And the expression on her face, so shocked, so… what? So affectionate…?

“Slyde. Go.”

Silver’s hiss in his ear. Damn it. Cursing behind his mask, Slyde whirled and kicked off with his back foot, immediately propelling himself back along the shadowed passage with a silken whoosh – and, in response, there came a cry of annoyance.

“Boss! The runt at the back, with the goggles. He’s making a break for it…!”

Even though the Shroud was the de facto leader of his party, when Cylla Markham said ‘boss’ she was talking to her own personal employer, Thomas Fireheart. She was an obdurate sort, fiercely loyal to a fault, and was disinclined to take orders from anyone else. Therefore, when she saw Slyde rush away, her first instinct was to give chase – and when Shroud barked for her to stop, she ignored him utterly.

“Scylla, no!” Shroud cried. “Leave him to me! I can waylay him with—”

“With the power of the Darkforce?” a throaty voice roared. “Sorry Max. No way can I let you get in between me and that cure…”

The Shroud was already conjuring tendrils of pure, liquid darkness, blacker than the blackest shadow, from the folds of his cloak when an enormous figure loomed before him – and then a quicksilver claw lashed out and raked him savagely across the chest and shoulders, shredding darkness and cloth alike, not to mention flesh, and sending Shroud flying backwards through the air with a breathless scream.

Jack Russell surged forward, his talons dripping with blood and his fangs bared. He was a truly fearsome sight, a beast of immense weight and towering height, all bristling bronze-black fur and corded muscle and pure animal aggression. The Werewolf, one of the purest of his cursed kind. In contrast, Thomas Fireheart – as the spiritual shape-shifter Puma – was far less imposing, being smaller and lighter on his feet, and retaining a more human countenance then his fellow hybrid. However, what Puma lacked in carriage he more than made up for with heart, and with speed; seeing the Werewolf’s murderous intent he hurled himself between the beast and his injured prey, slipping deftly beneath Jack’s distended underbelly and then lurching upwards with squared shoulders and a flurry of claws.

The Werewolf felt himself rise and twist from his haunches, losing all balance as his momentum was used against him to pitch him sideways… and then he shrieked in pain and fury as he was all but disemboweled by the Puma’s expertly judged attack, his guts suddenly hot and red and spilling out from his ruptured flesh even as he skidded and slammed into the wall of the passage with enough bodily weight to splinter the thick oak paneling.

Jack scrabbled, trying to rise but failing, his intestines flapping and slopping about his groin and thighs like strings of sausages. There was dark blood everywhere, and an animal stink. But he wasn’t dead.

Far from it.

Puma saw the flare of his enemy’s blood red eyes and experienced an unfamiliar emotion: fear.

Breathing heavily, still squealing and snarling at the back of his throat, the Werewolf began to shovel his guts back into his opened stomach with huge, spade-like claws. Already his leathery flesh and black fur was beginning to knit back together, his preternaturally accelerated healing factor in full flow – and seemingly augmented fivefold by whatever magicks flowed through the chateau’s halls. Puma’s bright eyes narrowed. He had no idea how quick the process would be, but Jack Russell would repair himself fully if given the chance – and then he’d be more than a match for his attacker. That meant that Puma needed to go on the offensive and not back down until one or other of them was dead.

Steeling himself, Puma sprang forward, all teeth and claw, and the bloodied Werewolf rose in fury to greet him…

Further along the corridor, Silver Sable gauged her immediate situation – specifically Scylla’s swift advance, in pursuit of Slyde – with a cool eye. She didn’t recognize her enemy, and obviously had no opportunity to reference her data. However, this woman – with a face obscured by a tarnished metal half-mask that was seemingly soldered to what remained of her flesh, and with a heavy-set body sheathed in an asymmetrical patchwork of armor – was evidently a cyberform of some description, her standard physiology enhanced by any number of bionic implants. “Fortunately,” Silver murmured to herself, “I’ve got an app for that…”

As Scylla hurtled along the hallway in Slyde’s wake, resolutely ignoring all those around her, Silver slinked forward and palmed a small, disc-shaped device from her utility belt. She slapped the device against Scylla’s near shoulder as she passed, and there was an instant reaction – a black, smoking crackle of electrical discharge accompanied by a piercing whine, followed a second later by a guttural shriek and much thrashing of arms as Scylla careened sideways, her equilibrium shot. She impacted with the wall, splintering more wooden panels, and her legs buckled beneath her.

Silver loomed close, a satisfied smile twitching at her lips.

“Standard electromagnetic pulse, with a special twist of bioelectrical current disturbance, developed for cybernetic/muscle union,” she declared, sliding a handgun from its hip holster. “You’ll be immobilized for—”

“Gnakken etch!” Scylla snarled. Her vocal chords were traumatized and her movements spasmodic, but immobilized she was not. She lurched upwards, listing to the right but compensating quickly, and the steel-lined crown of her skull slammed into Silver’s jaw with a sickening crunch, sending the other woman sprawling.

Scylla extended an arm and released a whipcrack of a cybernetic tendril from her wrist. The lash hissed and snapped, searing the wall high above Silver’s head where she was now leaning, stunned. Scylla cursed, retracting the lash and then releasing again, screaming as she did so. This strike also went wild, which was just as well for her intended victim; at close quarters she would have lost her head clean from her neck had the attack connected as Scylla wished.

“Ukki,” Scylla snarled, shaking her head irritably, like a dog with fleas. “Eck ime, ouh eie.”

And with that she turned and began staggering away along the shadowed passageway, bumping and stumbling against one wall and then the other but resolute in her pursuit of Slyde. Silver watched her go, dazed and nauseous, one arm hanging limply at her side due to what was likely a shattered collarbone or maybe a torn ligament in her neck or shoulder. That EMP disc was designed to take down Deathlok, she thought to herself in dismay. The woman’s circuits should have been fried to the extent of electrical catatonia… but her human biology, or more specifically the sheer power of her emotional strength, had overridden the bionic disturbance. She was moving poorly, as if inebriated, but she wasn’t anywhere near incapacitated. Fascinating. Whoever this Scylla was, she was unexpectedly resilient…

“Slyde,” Silver hissed into her mouthpiece, grimacing as she tasted blood on her lips. “You’ve got a hostile on your ass. Stay alert!”

“Uh… yeah. Check on that.”

Now a considerable distance from his companions, Slyde had emerged from a maze of passageways into a wider hall, a gallery dominated by a grand staircase directly ahead and flanked by a number of oak doors. A pair of enormous plate glass windows crested the staircase like an owl’s eyes, shining at the edges with milky moonlight and shifting, eerily, with the silhouettes of trees beyond, dancing in a soundless breeze. Slyde had no time for admiring the architecture, however.

Hostile on his ass? Uh-huh. And then some…

The gallery was three-quarters cast in heavy shadow, and out of these shadows came the slithering, shambling golems conjured by Josef Schwartz’s magic. A dozen of the beasts, possibly more, fashioned from all manner of repellant substances; they stank of death and decay, and of the jungle, and the ocean. They had little in the way of discernible faces but they were definitely shaped with long, gangling limbs, a number of which ended in savage claws. And they were homing in on Slyde.

In one trembling hand Slyde held a transmitter device with a simple digital compass screen. The device was powered with an odd white glow, which – according to Vera Gêmeos – was derived from the first half of the Key already in her possession. This energy would lead him to the second Key half, and the signal was directing him off to his right – not up the staircase, but instead towards a particular doorway set back in an alcove beyond the rest on the right hand wall. There was no telling how many of these lumbering beach hulks stood between him and the door, and that was the problem. They didn’t seem particularly swift on their feet, not like him, but they made up for that with the sheer number of them. If he could just distract them in some—

“Ey! Ogguls!”

Slyde glanced back over his shoulder in surprise, just in time to see Scylla lurch into the gallery behind him. She reached for him, snarling… but misjudged the distance between them and staggered away to the left, leaving a trail of acrid sparks in her wake.

The golems took note, swaying momentarily in the direction of this new enemy.

Behind his mask, Slyde blinked… and then grinned.

“Thanks there, honey bear,” he declared. “You may be all the opportunity I need…”

“Michael…?”

Back in the passageway where the two opposing factions had unwittingly been drawn into conflict, Asp had approached Michael Morbius with caution – but also with great tenderness. She was a rare beauty and no mistake, but her countenance was more accustomed to sly superiority than compassion, at least these days. Morbius remembered her differently, however. He remembered the girl this woman had once been, back in more innocent days before the world had turned her… just as, in its own way, it had transformed him.

“Hello, Anneke,” he said, softly. “It’s been a long time.”

And it had. What was it now? Eight years? Time enough for everything to change. It had all been so easy back then, him as a recent graduate in biochemistry and setting out to become a university lecturer, and Anneke as one of his first students. The striking Egyptian girl with her dark, dark eyes and exciting smile, her quick intelligence and her ambition; he’d become smitten with her so easily, and she with him in turn. They’d spent six months together before their relationship had foundered but, deep down, the spark had remained. Perhaps that was the tragedy of it all. Perhaps it could all have been so different if only they’d worked through their problems instead of becoming playthings of fate’s cruelty…

“It’s not Anneke any more though, is it?” Morbius said, with sadness. “You changed your name after you gave yourself away to Roxxon. ‘Cleopatra Nefertiti’, yes? Very… humble. You always did have a taste for the theatrical.”

The Asp bristled, her gaze darkening. “And you, Michael, developed a taste for blood. I think I know which one of us came off better there.”

“Really? What happened to me was an accident. I contracted a rare and potentially fatal blood disease, but in seeking to counter that I unwittingly transformed myself into this. You…? You had your whole life ahead of you. You had such plans, Anneke. You could have been an exemplary scientist, an innovator. But you signed your soul over to the Roxxon corporation and their experiments—”

“Because I was all but destitute, Michael!” Cleo snapped. “I had no family. No inheritance, no silver spoon. No research grants. I was working as a waitress and exotic dancer, just to eat. You never had any idea how desperate things were for some of us students, you never had to go through it yourself. I was twenty-four hours from being on the streets. Roxxon gave me an alternative. The only alternative.”

“Yes,” Morbius whispered. “They turned you into a monster.”

Asp glowered, stepping back now and extending one hand in threat. “Takes one to know one,” she said, coldly. “I… loved you, Michael. I truly did. For the sake of that love, don’t make me have to hurt you now.”

“Hurt me…?”

Michael Morbius was a tragic figure in truth, but he wasn’t without his flaws. His biggest failing had always been a misplaced hubris – the kind of arrogance that had led him to believe that he could cure his own terminal blood ailment all those years ago instead of seeking help from better men. He looked at the Asp now and he still saw a slip of a girl who posed no threat to him whatsoever. Again, his conceit was to be his undoing.

Morbius swept forward, deceptively swift and light with his uncannily hollow bones, and as he gathered his former lover in his arms he commanded himself to resist the temptation to duck his head towards her exposed throat. The creature in him was roused by the palpable throb of her blood beneath her dusky skin just as the man in him responded to the once-familiar warmth and rise of her body pressed against him… but Asp, in contrast, was utterly focused. She let herself be collected, as her own power depended upon physical closeness.

The power in question was her highly toxic touch of death.

“I’m sorry,” she said, with genuine regret. And then she curled her fingers about Morbius’ pale wrist even as he held her close, and the biochemical venom secreted from her pores immediately set to work, attacking her enemy’s already-infected blood.

Morbius jolted as if shocked, then spasmed and recoiled. His crimson eyes shot wide and he bared his fangs with a hiss, not dissimilar to that of a snake itself.

“What…?” he breathed. “What did you…?”

His wrist burned. He staggered, his limbs stiffening and giving way. He slumped back against the nearest wall, helpless as the paralysis took hold. Asp looked down on him, tears glinting in her eyes.

But then… then, something happened that neither of them were expecting. Morbius’ complexion – previously pallid and with flesh like fine leather – began to flush and soften, becoming more human. He twitched and cried, breathless, but then he began to regain control of himself, even as his body noticeably began to take on a harder, weightier shape – a change in his musculature. It seemed an agonizing transformation, but was mercifully rapid. And it wasn’t the process of becoming a monster, no.

It was… the unbecoming.

“My God,” Morbius crooned, his eyes brightening and taking on their former hue, the gentle brown they’d been before being darkened to black-red by his curse. “My God! You’ve… reversed it all!”

He raised his hands, studying the new healthy coloring of his skin. He felt pain in every joint, every muscle – an old pain, a welcome pain, the pain of being human – and he rejoiced.

Human.

Human again! Whatever Asp’s toxin was, it hadn’t killed him as it would have done a normal man – but it had proved fatal for the disease that had previously held him in thrall, that had transformed him into a living vampire. After so long searching for a cure, all those past failures and disappointments, and now…!

Michael Morbius turned towards Asp once more, grinning stupidly as he experienced the absurd delight of his own heart rhythmically pumping pure blood through his veins once more. In that moment he cared nothing for the Gemini Key or the Shroud’s mission; he only knew that he was a man redeemed.

And then he knew the sudden distress of something hard impacting with his new face, followed by unconsciousness. As he slumped, Asp stood above him with a length of splintered oak paneling in her hands, cradling it like a baseball bat.

“Stay down, Michael,” she said with a scowl. “We’ve got a job to do here, and if you get in my way again, the next touch will kill you…”

“I’ll kill you for this! Kill you!”

Josef Schwartz was venting his spleen in German, so the precise import of his words was lost on Slyde. However, the villain understood the gist of it – especially as Josef was waving his arms about in frenzy, encouraging his immediate surroundings to take up in a maniacal, mystical dance and to set about his enemy with a passion. Slyde was hemmed in on all sides by a most bizarre selection of arcane instruments, ranging from fluttering scrolls and flying scepters to a rollickingly animated cello, all of which were attempting to snare him, batter him, impale him and generally do him liberal damage. It was like being caught up in a murderous version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – the Disney version, naturally, not the awful Nicolas Cage movie of the same name. Slyde had never liked Nicolas Cage. Right now he wasn’t too keen on being cast as Mickey Mouse either, and he would have been even less delighted if he’d known that the Disney film was based on an eighteenth century poem by the German writer Goethe. Because what the hell was it with these damn Bavarians? All so overly dramatic…

Still, Slyde reasoned, it would all be worth it if he could just reach the Key.

“Destroy him!” Josef raged, his eyes now white and the corners of his mouth frothing as he gave himself over as a conduit of magical energies. “Rend him limb from limb for trying to take my Isidora from me…!”

Josef swept his arms back and forth, causing the surroundings walls to swell and crack and the wooden floor underfoot to begin to undulate, as if driven on the backs of gigantic worms. There was a single pair of double doors leading into this room and these now flew open with a crash, heralding the arrival of the horde of golems Slyde had only just managed to avoid earlier. He’d skated past these enemies in a frictionless rush – aided by Scylla’s unbalanced flailing and drawing attention to herself, bless her – and had subsequently found himself in the shadowed gallery where Josef Schwartz stored his sorcerous treasures. Slyde didn’t care about Josef himself, he was merely following the directions of the device in his hand – directions that would lead to the second half of the Gemini Key – but the excitable German was proving impossible to ignore.

Slyde swore and ducked as an ancient grimoire came flying at him, flapping its heavy, dusty pages like a leather-bound bat, then shifted back and forth on the glossy soles of his feet, gliding effortlessly over the splintering floor and spinning lithely about the hips like a figure skater. He snatched up the most dangerous looking implement to hand – dangerous in this instance meaning long and stabby, in the form of a pointed ivory staff crested with a crescent moon – and swung the staff with all his strength as the golem hordes shambled towards him.

The crescent at the apex of the staff cleaved through the grotesques like a scythe, scattering kelp, barnacles and driftwood in all directions… but still the golems continued to advance, even the ones that had lost any semblance of a head or limbs.

“Arse,” said Slyde. “Why does nothing ever work the way you want it too…?”

An outstretched claw slapped dryly at his chest but slid away from his frictionless suit, unable to garner any purchase. To an extent Slyde was, quite literally, untouchable – but the sheer numbers of his foes meant that he could be smothered and suffocated regardless. He needed to find what he’d come for and haul tail without further delay. Fortunately the device in his fist was beginning to throb and bleep in response to being in close proximity to his target, as Vera Gêmeos had promised it would; unfortunately, it appeared that the highly irksome Scylla wasn’t done with him yet.

“Hey, Goggles!” a female voice snarled from close by. Slyde whirled to see the cyborg advancing on him through a parting tide of golems, scattering the beasts with wild swings of her cybernetic lash. She was evidently regaining her base motor functions, including the use of her larynx. And Scylla loved to use her larynx.

“Fiends!” Josef shrieked. “Intruders! You—”

“Quiet!” Scylla snapped, elbowing the German square in the face as she passed and sending him sprawling with a bloodied nose. She ignored him otherwise, just as she ignored a lively conga of magically animated wooden discs that were attempting to snake about her ankles, and the cello that was hammering out a discordant melody as it rubbed rather fruitlessly against her back. Magical nonsense be damned; she only had eyes for Slyde.

And, behind his goggles, Slyde only had eyes for the Gemini Key.

The Key half was embedded in a crate of twitching, flickering artifacts. It was around ten inches long and onyx black, pure black, compromised of a thin, unadorned shaft and a semi-circular crown. It was the mirror opposite of its sister half, the white key Slyde had already obtained from the heart of a labyrinthine deathtrap in Indonesia a week or so previously. It looked… utterly unremarkable. But the special device Slyde was palming was going crazy, so there was no mistaking that this was the prize he was seeking.

He cast aside the ivory staff he was still clutching and instead reached out and took the key.

“Slyde to Silver,” he reported through his bluetooth mouthpiece. “Item acquired, baby doll. Am I slick or am I slick…?”

“You’ll be slick with blood when I’m done with you!” Scylla hissed, lashing out with her wrist whip and catching Slyde on the arm. Even this sudden and precise contact skidded off the surface of Slyde’s polished suit rather than slicing through it, as it would have done most other materials, but the impact caused the villain to stumble nonetheless – and to drop what he was holding…

“Slyde to Silver. Item acquired, baby doll.”

Back in the other wing of the chateau, Silver heard Slyde’s voice over her earpiece and grunted her approval as she heaved herself to her feet, grinding her teeth against the pain of her damaged shoulder. She assessed her immediate situation with a solemn glance.

The wounded Shroud was still down, slumped in a corner and showing no signs of returning to the fight. Close by, Asp was standing over the fallen Morbius, ready to deliver another swift strike with the wooden club she was brandishing – but the disgraced doctor wasn’t moving any more than Shroud was, and his face was a bloodied pulp, indicating that Asp had more than accounted for his threat. Further down the passageway, the furious shred of fur and limb and claw that had been transpiring previously had now quietened, with one of the savage shapeshifters involved left in a ruined heap whilst the other one was stepping clear, growling low in his throat.

The victor was the bigger and stronger of the two, brute force having overcome swiftness. It was Jack, the Werewolf, who was triumphant. Fireheart, the Puma, was defeated – or perhaps worse. Silver felt a pang of remorse, seeing the bronzed orange fur of a man she’d known well – known intimately, if truth be told – now soaked through with blood. There was no rise and fall of his chest, no sound of ragged breathing. Had Jack slaughtered his foe…?

The Werewolf turned back along the passage, red eyes glowing like hot coals. His fangs were glinting, his fur bristling. His rage was barely contained. Asp witnessed this and retreated to Silver’s side, her dark eyes wide with fear.

“Cure,” the Werewolf growled, from the pits of its cadaverous gut. “Cure!”

“Slyde,” Silver murmured into her mouthpiece. “Don’t attempt to find your way back here. Get to the aircraft, we’ll rendezvous with you there. Just one thing before you go. Shroud’s presence here means there’s been a change of plan, and – for today at least – I won’t be looking to search Schwartz’s hoard for the treasures he looted from Symkaria during the war. My own catharsis can wait. However, there is one more item I need you to try and locate…”

“Little busy here, actually!” Slyde cried, gliding away from another of Scylla’s attacks. “Can I call you back? Maybe Tuesday, we’ll do lunch…”

There were golems everywhere, clawing and biting, and their threat was becoming a worry. Scylla was even more of a menace however, with her bludgeoning fists as much as the relentless crack of her cybernetic lash – which was why Slyde, a shrewder character than many people gave him credit for, had deliberately circled the hallway and led his pursuer back towards the middle of the room. This was where Josef was now back on his feet, cradling a rather vicious looking magical contraption that was beginning to spit blue sparks. And Slyde was a great believer in utilizing every aspect of his environment.

Slyde swept past Josef, ducking his head as he went, then immediately altered his trajectory towards the room’s singular exit. In trying to follow, Scylla – usually fleet of foot herself, but incredibly cumbersome compared to Slyde – lumbered straight into Josef, and into the path of the sorcerous weapon he was bringing to bear. Just as Slyde had intended.

There was an almighty explosion of blue-black magic, and reality itself seemed to quake for an instant. Certainly there was a renewed rupturing of the surrounding walls and floor, and an unearthly keening from the nearby golems, many of which had spontaneously caught fire.

Scylla staggered backwards, blood, oil and smoke in equal measure leaking from numerous new cavities in her chest…

“There’s another artifact,” Silver’s voice sounded impatiently in Slyde’s earpiece. “It’s something I promised Jack in return for his help here, a cure for his condition. According to my research, Schwartz’s name was linked to looted arcane treasures from a private museum in Egypt. One of these treasures was a staff belonging to a twelfth century healer from the Nile delta; an ivory staff with a crescent moon at the tip…”

Crescent?

Slyde glanced around as he reached the room’s exit, by way of scrambling over the heads of a dozen distressed golems. The staff. The staff he’d been holding! It was no more than twenty feet away, over towards the nearside wall. There were no golems in this immediate vicinity, and Scylla was otherwise occupied with Josef. It wouldn’t take a second to skate over and retrieve this second artifact as Silver was requesting. But…

Slyde paused. He thought of Jack Russell, and of the rugged fellow’s conduct back in the aircraft in which they’d traveled to this island. Jack hadn’t been pleasant. Jack had made eyes at his girlfriend Cleo.

Jack… hadn’t deserved any gesture of goodwill. And, at heart, Jalome Beacher was actually a bit of a bastard.

“Sorry, babe,” Slyde said coldly, his mouth set into a sly smile beneath his mask as he turned away from the hall. “No sign of any such item, and if I delay any longer I’ll risk losing the Key. You copy? I feel sorry for Jack, but them’s the breaks, right? I’ll meet you outside, kid. Then we can blow this thing and go home…”

“Shroud? Shroud…!”

Maximillian Coleridge groaned and shifted in his cloak and cowl, trying to concentrate through the red mist of his pain. There was a voice at his ear, and hands on his shoulders, trying to help him sit up. His body was protesting, however, and he could taste blood. What the hell had happened…?

He remembered Jack Russell, the Werewolf. A man he’d once considered a friend. He remembered Jack attacking, and then there was only agony and darkness. But what of the others? What of the Key…?

“Wake the hell up, you son of a moonless night! We need you!”

It was the woman’s voice. Cylla Markham.

Shroud grit his teeth, his senses reeling as he forced himself to focus.

“Sable,” he hissed. “Silver Sable, and her team. Where…?”

“They all lit out of here,” Scylla barked. “They got what they came for and they split. I almost got the slippery eel guy with the goggles but I got blindsided by some German knucklehead who was using magic. And there were these… things… made out of wood and seaweed… but, whatever. None of that matters. I got away and came straight back here, only to find you three in a world of hurt. Fireheart’s down, Shroud. My Thomas. That wolf bastard, he tore him apart… he’s dying. You’ve got to save him, Shroud. You hear me? You save him or I’ll break every miserable bone in your—”

“They got the Key,” Shroud breathed. “So I failed. It should have been so simple but I failed…”

“Are you listening?”

Scylla shook the man in black, causing him to scream – and also to focus much more.

“The boss told me you could do this thing with Darkforce,” Scylla snarled. “Some kind of teleportation whoosis? Said it was ridiculously dangerous, which is why we came here by air instead of you cooking up some portal or other in the first place. But get this, Shroud. Thomas won’t live long enough for us to get off this island by plane, and that German guy with his golems, they’re all still around. You need to do something. Now. And, if you need an incentive other than me threatening you with a world of hurt… there’s this.”

Scylla handed Shroud something. He took it wearily, then was suddenly attentive as his senses picked up on the specific mystic frequency that the object was imbued with.

“That goggles freak, he dropped this,” Scylla explained. “He kept hold of the Key but left this behind. It’s some kind of device, he was using it to find the Key. Like a metal detector? I figure, if he could use it, maybe you can too. Maybe it can guide you to go get both halves of the Key, right?”

Shroud gripped the homing device in his gloved palm, his determination rising anew.

Yes, they were all humbled… all in pain. But yes, he could trespass upon the Darkforce Dimension if necessary, regardless of how perilous such a strategy would be. The game wasn’t lost yet.

There was still time to save the world…

“Gather Morbius and Fireheart,” Shroud hissed, even as he began to conjure misty tendrils of darkness from thin air. “We’re going after that Key!”

TO BE CONTINUED in AGENTS OF GEMINI #4…