Everything you need to know about Rebecca Lockwood, from Marvel Omega’s Ghost Rider # 1-7…

Fledgling FBI agent (Missing Persons Division) Rebecca Lockwood hasn’t enjoyed much luck in her life. Things turned bad when her beloved father died when she was thirteen, and since then every experience has been touched with a hint of melancholy. Pretty, resourceful, sometimes charming, often vulnerable, always cynical, an aficionado of old films and miserable music, armed with a dry wit and a wicked tongue (in her own words: “Apparently I’ve got this whole achingly cute thing going on, up until the point when I open my mouth”), Becky trudges through life day-to-day, fully expecting disaster to strike. And then it does.

Assigned to a new case, Becky tracks a man to a mountain cabin in the Virginia Appalachians, and subsequently becomes embroiled in a conflict between Heaven, Hell and an ambiguous third party. The man in question is Johnny Blaze, and when Becky takes possession of Johnny’s motorcycle she unwittingly unleashes the curse that has plagued Johnny for so many years: becoming host to the demon Zarathos, Rebecca Lockwood is now the new Ghost Rider.

As the Ghost Rider, Becky tackles fiendish Seekers, the rogue angel Edrebus, an unholy place of torment known as the House of Roses and in conclusion the ultimate evil of Mephisto, before her unfortunate life is extinguished. With her immortal soul unwelcome in Heaven but safely removed from Hell – and unwilling to find sanctuary in the mysterious Other Place, at least for now – what will become of Becky? And, even though Zarathos has been purged from her, does any part of the Spirit of Vengeance remain?

Four years on from the last Rebecca Lockwood adventure, answers are finally at hand…

A PRAYER TO ANYONE WHO’LL LISTEN

By Meriades Rai

“There’s a toad in the witch grass, there’s a crow in the corn
Wild flowers on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying for her mom
As the hills turn from green back to gold.

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there
for Georgia Lee?”

Tom Waits, ‘Georgia Lee’

The witches came and took Pepe from his cage and dragged him away by the ankles, laughing among themselves as he screamed. His body left a furrow in the dirt. The remaining children huddled together in their fright, backs pressed against the bars of their prison and tears burning, and listened to Pepe’s shrieks grow distant after he’d disappeared through the cellar door. The door was locked again behind him, as if the cage wasn’t enough. There were three lit candles on the table in the corner of the cellar, illuminating the children as they wept. The air smelled of wax and smoke and filth.

And then, after a while, Pepe stopped screaming.

This was a mercy in one sense, but all the more terrifying in another. Now the children were left to wonder which one of them would be next.

It was Anya who detached herself from the pack and went to sit at the front of the cage, her eyes closed and her hands clasped in front of her. Her tears had left pale ribbons in the grime on her cheeks. She spoke beneath her breath, each word faint but measured.

“I thought you said prayer was stupid,” Vitaly murmured at Anya’s shoulder. He spoke in Russian.

Anya paused, her small jaw clenched.

“Praying to God is stupid,” she said. “Because we’ve been praying to God for five days and nights, and He ignores us, just as He ignores all suffering. My prayers are for someone else.”

“Who?”

Anya’s hands twisted together, and another teardrop glistened in the candlelight.

“Anyone who’ll listen,” she said, softly.

The scariest thing that ever happened to me? Well, recent events excluded of course. Feeling your flesh and soul consumed in supernatural conflagration and doing spiritual battle with devils, these experiences are ankle-tremblers in their own right. But, you know. Before that.

I was seventeen and I was out for the night with Betsy Cray and Mindy Anderson and a bunch of other friends, and we got drunk. And, I mean, dead drunk. All of us, even our designated driver, who – according to eyewitness accounts we later pieced together – was actually the first to get utterly leathered on cider and gin and who was also high on weed and whatever the hell else she could get her hands on when we all clambered into the back of her jalopy. It’s amazing she didn’t kill us all. Pearl Gerber her name was, so you can imagine her nickname, especially as she was a total slut. I don’t know if she got bombed by the Japanese but she was invaded by pretty much every other nationality before she’d graduated college, let me tell you.

Anyway. I was… obliterated. The kind of drunk where you really don’t know what happened the night before rather than this just being an excuse to cover up your embarrassment. No one else was able to fill me in on the details in the days to come either, seeing as they were similarly intoxicated. So, how I ended up in the middle of some farmer’s field five miles outside of my hometown of Dalton, Massachusetts no one will ever know, least of all me.

Not that I knew where I was when I woke up to find a crow perched on my chest, staring me in the eye as if he was getting ready to peck it out. Never trust a crow. This wasn’t a great start, but it got worse. I was wet from rain, I smelled bad and I could barely talk. I had no phone, no bag. The back of my head hurt, maybe from hitting the ground when I’d passed out, or maybe because all the alcohol had settled there overnight. I’m pretty sure I heard my brain slosh when I eventually pulled myself together enough to move.

I discovered that no one else was around, and that I was some ways distant from the nearest main road. I was seventeen and I was stupid. I had no idea where I was.

Christ, I was terrified. Shivering, bone-dead petrified. I walked maybe a mile and a half along tracks of mud and furrowed dirt and I-didn’t-want-to-know-what before a guy in a tractor came over the hill ahead of me and slowed when he saw me. The farmer whose field I’d woken up in. He was a kindly old man, and he took me under his wing without a blink. Rode me up to the farmhouse, fixed me a strong pot of coffee and something to eat, called my stepfather. Because my real dad, the one who loved me, he was four years in the ground by then.

Man, thinking about it now, I feel seventeen again. And, with all the stuff I’ve experienced since… how lucky was I, really? That it was someone with a good heart who found me out there alone, and not some killer or rapist. Or worse. Odds on I didn’t appreciate it at the time. I was just worried what my step-dad would say, and do (and with good reason, although this isn’t the time and the place to go into that).

Why am I thinking of that morning now? Because waking up here, beneath icy skies streaked with blood and surrounded by glacial rocks and waterfalls and glittering pools of what looks more like diamond dust than water… waking up with nothing, and not knowing where I am… it’s even worse the second time. Because this time I remember that I’m dead, and sometimes being able to remember is a lot more frightening than not.

“Who art thou?”

I look up to see a woman standing over me, and all at once I feel intimidated and unworthy and jealous and cross and spiteful and… stuff. That may sound strange, but you probably have to be female to understand. See, there are women and there are women, and if you’re one of the former and you find yourself in the presence of the latter then all those emotions I just listed are perfectly commonplace.

These women, they’re just… oh God. It’s like someone’s taken all these familiar pieces and slotted them together in a way that just works, like that’s how it’s supposed to be, when otherwise imperfection is the norm. This particular woman, she’s tall (but, you know, not stupidly tall, like basketball player tall) and she’s slender (but, again, nowhere near ‘I only eat three chick peas and a glass of mango juice a day and then I throw up and call my agent’ skinny, because she’s still got curves to die for), and she’s got great hair (black, long, television commercial, because she’s worth it). And all the green and black she’s wearing, the cloak and the bodice with the plunging neckline and the thigh-high boots with killer heels, and especially the spider-leg headdress, it just shouldn’t work, it’s against every fashion code there is, but damn her if she’s not just… lovely. She’s like a walking caress of leather and silk and intricate ironwork.

And she smells like macadamia nuts and honey, for goodness’ sake. Because just looking good isn’t enough.

So, yeah. I don’t know who she is, but I hate her. And so do you, goddamn it.

“I asked thee a question,” the woman says, in a voice like rain. The sound when she moves is somewhere between a creak and whisper. All that leather on skin, and probably some nylon in there too. It’s the most erotic sound I’ve ever heard.

“I’d make some joke about Dorothy and Toto, but I doubt you’d get the references,” I say. “That, and the context would be wildly inappropriate considering the sexual tension in the air.”

The woman cocks her head, the iron and feathers of her headdress shimmering. I can see her eyes behind the almond cutouts of her half-mask, twin pools of exquisite violet and turquoise flecked with jade. Her lips are full and stained a purple so dark they may as well be black. Like she’s spent the morning slowly rolling blackcurrants on her tongue until they burst. Lordy. If my life was a film, this part would be Swedish.

“My name’s Rebecca,” I say. “Rebecca Lockwood. I’m-”

“Human.”

I pause, then nod. I was going to say ‘dead’, but hey-ho. I’d like to think my expression is admirably nonchalant regardless. The woman scowls.

“Curious,” she purrs, her lips slightly parted. “Human indeed… but not necessarily, by common association, mortal. Art thou then also a God, Rebecca Lockwood?”

I consider this. I know what Dan Ackroyd would reply, but he was always too honest for his own good, bless him.

Before I can say anything the woman reaches out with a hand gloved in stitched hide so luxurious and tightly fitting it’s like a second skin. I shiver when I feel her fingertips upon my skin, at which point it occurs to me that, yes, I do have skin. And hair and eyes, and feet, and everything else. None of it to compare to hers, of course (the bitch), but it’s an improvement on what I was expecting when I supposedly faded from corporeal existence after my experiences as the Ghost Rider.

The woman flinches and quickly withdraws her hand. I see her eyes flash.

“A Spirit of Vengeance,” she breathes. I pale.

“Oh. Oh, did you just read my mind by touching me? Because… well, look, I’m sorry I called you a bitch. Mentally. See, it’s a natural jealousy thing. Like, there are women and there are women, and-”

“Prohibited from thy mortal Heaven and Hell by thy actions, thy vagrant spirit now seeks eternal accommodation elsewhere,” the woman in green says. “And, touched by certain essences, thy journey brings thee here, to me.”

“And you are…?”

“Hela. The Asgardian goddess of the realms of Hel and Niffleheim.”

I purse my lips. “Hela… from Hel? So, like Finn from Finland? Or Louisa from Louisianna? It could be worse, I guess. You could have been christened Niffle.”

The woman, Hela, leans close. I fancy that her breath does indeed smell like blackcurrants, although that may just be me being fruity.

“Thou seek to mask thy fear and disorientation through humor,” she declares. “Thou art no God, little girl.”

“But my impudence impresses you, right?”

“Nay.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly I find myself on the verge of tears, although whether this stems more from frustration or sadness I’m not entirely sure. I don’t do crying as a rule, but then I’ve recently been subject to a number of unfamiliar emotions. I need a cigarette.

“Listen, I didn’t ask for any of this, okay?” I sniff. “None of it. And I certainly didn’t want to be dead, with my soul shunted off to some otherworldly Valhalla I never even imagined existed outside of fairy tales-”

“This is not Valhalla,” Hela says, coldly. Apparently that hits a nerve. Who knew? I roll my eyes.

“Oh, whatever. I don’t care. I’m not the Ghost Rider any more, and I’m not even sure if I qualify as Becky Lockwood. You don’t want me in your little corner of the afterlife? Fine. Show me the door and I’ll be on my way.”

Hela stares at me, then ruffles her cloak and looks away. For a moment I think I’ve offended her again – honestly, these immortals? Talk about highly-strung – but then she speaks, her gaze trained on some invisible point in the distance.

“Vengeance lingers in thy heart, mortal,” she murmurs. “Thou believe it purged, and true enough the demon that tainted thee is gone, but a measure of arcane energy resides there still. Thou have… a purpose, should thee accept it.”

“What do you mean? What purpose?”

Hela turns her head towards me once more, and for the first time I see her smile. It’s beautiful, like everything else about her, and it melts something inside of me whether I want it to or not, but that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant. It’s not. It’s like how a cat might regard a bird when it suddenly realizes that the bird’s full of worms and is too fat to fly.

“There is reason, I suspect, why thou has been sent to me by whatever means,” she says. “I am reluctant to let thy spirit fade ’til that curious truth is exposed. For now, Rebecca Lockwood… dost thou wish to understand the nature of this Vengeance of which we speak…?”

In an instant I’m feeling that Dan Ackroyd vibe again, only in negative.

Ray, when someone asks you if you wish to understand the nature of Vengeance, you say… No!

But even as I start to reply, I know it’s too late.

Besides, it’s not like Hela of Hel is listening to me anyhow…

There was no way of gauging how time was passing in the cellar; there were no windows, no sounds from outside the room other than screaming whenever a new child was taken away, and whenever any of the three candles on the table in the corner burned away, one of the witches simply replaced it.

Anya and the other children knew, instinctively, that they would be visited again soon, however. They felt the fear like a knot of spiders in their stomachs, and perhaps – terrible though it might be to imagine – if they’d held a sharpened edge in their possession they might have used it to end their own young lives before their tormentors came for them.

Regrettably, there was no such respite.

Anya had ceded to a fitful slumber, brought on by nervous exhaustion, when one of her fellow prisoners gave a cry. She was awake instantly, eyes wide and fixed upon the large oak door beyond the bars. But there were no witches, and no telltale sound of their shuffling, skittering approach. Anya frowned. Then she saw the flickering light and turned her head.

Only two candles now burned upon the table, one having already guttered and expired. This was what had caused another child to cry out. As Anya stared, she saw the second flame suddenly waver, and then wink and extinguish with a curl of smoke. There wasn’t usually a breeze in the cellar, even when the door was opened, but something was snuffing the candles. One by one by one…

Anya held her breath.

The third candle flickered… and then went out.

The children whimpered, plunged into pitch darkness. Anya felt a hand clutch her arm, filthy skin on filthy skin, and she heard Vitaly’s plaintive mewling at her ear. Something was happening. Something… different.

“Please,” Anya said, quietly. “Oh, please.”

And then…

…there was light.

It doesn’t hurt this time.

Something in me is worried by that. If I don’t feel any discomfort – to say the least – that my flesh is being seared from by bones by unholy fire, if supernatural spontaneous combustion doesn’t hurt, then surely that means this flesh – this body in general – isn’t as real as I’ve imagined it to be? Hela would be able to tell me. I’ve got an uneasy feeling Hela knows exactly what I am and what’s to become of me. But she’s not around to ask, not any more. Or, to be more precise, I’m no longer an uninvited guest in her presence. I’m… elsewhere.

I take in my new surroundings, noting that the stone walls and dirt floor of the enclosed space where I now find myself is lit by an eerie, shimmering blue glow – and then realizing that this glow is emanating from me. I’m on fire, but this new fire is blue and white, a hundred shades of blue, and it seems cold rather than hot. This isn’t the Ghost Rider manifesting through me, not this time, and the distinction doesn’t just come down to the lack of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

This is different.

Rebecca Lockwood, dead but not departed, is now the Spirit Of Vengeance. Go me.

And, judging by the sound of whimpering away to my left, I’m not alone…

I turn and see a cage, a cube of narrowly divided, rusted iron bars, taller than me and again as wide. Beyond the bars, I see children. I feel a painful contraction in my chest; even in this paranormal form I have a heart, and that heart is breaking.

I count eleven of them, mostly boys but at least two girls, including one huddled close to the nearest wall of bars, staring out at me with large, fearful eyes. Her hair and skin are filthy, her clothes little more than rags. Same for the others. It’s incongruous, but I can’t help but notice that all of them share another feature in common; they’re all overweight.

“You came,” the girl at the bars says. “You heard my prayer and you came.”

I hear the girl speak in foreign tongue – Eastern European, maybe, or Russian? Yes, probably Russian – and for a moment I don’t understand, but then her words begin to make sense, as if they’re being automatically translated in my head. I don’t know Russian. I shouldn’t be able to understand it. I lift a hand to my temple and notice that said hand is on fire, and completely skeletal beneath the blue flames. I trace the tips of my fingerbones from my forehead to my jaw, and it’s evident that my face has been similarly burned away, down to the skull. I’m observing through hollow sockets. I have no brain to speak of in my fleshless cranium.

I am an unliving cadaver, animated by unearthly magicks beyond my comprehension. Understanding Russian is probably the least of my eccentricities now.

“WHAT IS THIS?” I ask, shivering at the sound of my own voice. The intonation, deep and harsh, is reminiscent of how the demon Zarathos spoke through me when I was – we were – the Ghost Rider. Now it’s just me, but I’m not complaining. The voice seems… appropriate.

The girl is crying, but I can’t help but feel that they’re tears of joy.

“Please, help us!” she wails. “The camp leaders, they’re not people. We thought they were, but they’re not. They’re… witches. Baba Yaga! They tricked us, tricked our parents. Now they’re killing us, eating us-”

“STOP!”

I reach out with a burning hand and the girl flinches, but doesn’t retreat. She’s brave. She seems to understand – in the same way that I do, in that moment – that my flame won’t harm the innocent. I touch a finger to her forehead, and she shudders and closes her eyes. I see…

I see…

The girl’s name is Anya Kouriyakan. She’s ten years old, from a small town thirty miles north of Smolensk. Most of these children are from the same general area, and some are as young as seven. They don’t know where they are now, and that terrifies them. Just like Becky Lockwood aged seventeen, after a night on the hard stuff, awakening in a farmer’s field. But these kids, what’s happened to them isn’t their fault. They only know that their parents signed them up for some manner of summer health camp; as I noted, these children are all overweight, and their parents evidently decided that it wasn’t their responsibility to do something about this, instead entrusting their kids’ well-being to a clinic.

But this clinic was a sham. The camp leaders, as Anya said, were actually something other than human, camouflaged beneath illusion. These creatures were witches. Baba Yaga in the old tongue, as according to ancient Slavic legend; hideous old crones, deformed in body and soul by the blackest sorcery, prowling the forestland and feeding upon the flesh of the young. In some myths a Baba Yaga is described as living in a crooked house supported by chicken legs, and she flies through the air in an oversized mortar and pestle. The fact that I accept this without question tells you everything you need to know about the oddities I experienced in the days before I died.

There’s more in Anya’s mind. I see the illusion of the health camp stripped away once the parents had departed, and the screaming, horrified children being caged away in this filthy cellar. I watch, through Anya’s eyes, as the witches come and drag the children away one by one, cackling about how they’re treating themselves to ‘one more fat little bag of flesh for the cooking pot’.

There are eleven children in the cage.

There were twenty-eight when the Baba Yaga began to feed.

I slowly pull back my hand and stand away from the cage. Anya looks up at me beseechingly, her small life so steeped in the blackest terror that the presence of a flaming skeleton before her is a blessing.

“God wouldn’t listen,” she says. “He didn’t care. Will you help us instead?”

I clench my fists and a terrible light burns in the sockets of my skull. The light of Vengeance.

“OH, YES,” I tell the girl, and all the other children who now crowd around her and stare up at me. “BELIEVE ME, AT A TIME LIKE THIS I’M THE ONLY GOD ANYONE’S EVER GOING TO NEED.”

There are three Baba Yaga in this household, and all are clustered about what passes for their kitchen table when I come upon them. The scullery floor is littered with bones and rats. There’s a cooking pot on the fire, filled with broth the color of blood. And there are a number of greasy platters edged with tiny scraps of boy.

His name was Pepe, I know that from my brief time watching through Anya’s eyes. Before the witches’ illusion had been lifted Pepe told Anya that he was happy to be attending the camp. It had been confirmed that his weight problems were medical rather than down to poor diet and lack of exercise, but his parents had believed the clinic would be beneficial anyway. Pepe had been looking forward to trying his best to shed the pounds and make his parents proud.

As I stand there, looking on, I see the nearest of the Baba Yaga chewing on Pepe’s liver with her jagged black teeth. I’ll admit to a certain lack of restraint as I thrust out my burning fist and strike her so hard in the forehead that the sick, tar-black tumor that passes for the bitch’s brain explodes out the back of her skull and plasters the wall behind her.

The hag shudders, my hand embedded in her cranium up to the wrist. I spread my fingers, causing her skull to crack from the inside, then summon the power of Vengeance.

“BURN,” I tell her. And she does, erupting in a sudden explosion of a hundred shades of blue, cold fire rippling through every cell of her evil physical self and igniting it from the inside out. The first Baba Yaga becomes an inferno, but – being as good as dead already – she doesn’t scream.

Unrewarding, but no matter. There are still two to go.

The Baba Yaga on my left shrieks and leaps upon the table, her skinny legs bowed and ending in backwards feet punctuated with chicken claws. I can’t tell if she’s naked, she’s too hairy and filthy, but what skin I can see is rippling with lice and stink. She snatches something up and then lashes me with it; it’s a length of chain, constructed from tiny, interlocking bones. The bones of children.

The chain is infused with the darkest magic, the kind of magic crafted from the most unspeakable agonies, and the inherent pain of it causes me injury in turn where it strikes me. I stagger backwards and the witch lashes me again, cackling and allowing her pustulous tongue to spill between her lips. My cold fire gutters and spits. The chain whips forth a third time…

…and I catch it, even though the sting of its touch is marked.

“YOU BRANDISH SOUVENIRS OF THE DEAD, BELIEVING THEM IN NO POSITION TO OBJECT,” I snarl. “BUT VENGEANCE IN THEIR NAME AND SOUL IS LONG OVERDUE.”

I yank the Baba Yaga towards me via the chain and then loop it about her neck before she can escape. I pull tight, enough so that the bones of her victims slice into her skin even where the edges have worn blunt. Agony infects the witch’s black blood like poison, slowly coursing through her and causing her to howl like the animal she is.

It will take her a number of minutes to perish. Mindful that she might try and hinder me when I exact Vengeance upon her final sister, I reach down and break both her legs off at the knees, then spear her to the floor with her own splintered shin bones through her shoulders. Her screams are gratifying.

The remaining Baba Yaga takes flight whilst my back is turned, scrabbling through a window and out into the darkness of the night beyond. I follow, battering my way through the wall and leaving it to crumble to dust in my wake. Outside, the landscape is thick forest, lit only by diffused moonlight filtering down through the canopy overhead – and then by me, my blue light shining like a torch.

For a second the Baba Yaga eludes me, but then I turn to see her clambering into what can only be described as what it is: a gigantic stone dish with thick sides and a heavy base. A mortar. A traditional-sized mortar and pestle is simply a tool used for crushing and grinding hard substances to powder – peppercorns or spices in cookery for example, or medicines, or even some ingredients for art materials. In Slavic folklore, witches use gigantic ones to grind up their victims’ bones for soup and the ride around in them and howl at the moon. Slavs worry me.

Ahead of me, the witch clasps the stump of a massive club that’s even taller than she is – this mortar’s pestle – and with a shriek of triumphant delight begins to ascend into the night sky through a gap in the trees. I hesitate, then see another mortar and pestle close to where the first was stationed. I hesitate again. Then, with many misgivings, I approach the mortar and climb in, as the Baba Yaga did with hers, and grab the pestle. At my touch, there’s a thrilling whoosh and the entire apparatus in consumed with blue fire, before then rising from the ground in a flaming whorl.

Ooo.

“OKAY, SERIOUSLY,” I murmur, in a voice that’s admittedly more Rebecca than Vengeance. “MOTORCYCLES BE DAMNED, BECAUSE THIS IS TOTALLY AWESOME.”

I have no idea what kind of magic the witch is using to impel an outsized stone bowl through the twilight skies above the wild Russian forest, but whatever it is it can’t compete with hellfire propulsion. Not much can, I’d bet. I give chase for a mile or three before I manage to draw alongside her, at which point she thrusts a clawed hand back over her shoulder and screams something vile and olde worlde Slavic in my direction. Strings of living rot then gush from what passes for her fingertips, a cloud of clotted black spores that doesn’t burn in my flame but instead does all it can to snuff it. It’s not a pleasant experience.

I don’t have a hellfire Magnum or a chain of my own, two distinctive weapons I employed to wonderful effect when I was the Ghost Rider, so I’m forced to improvise.

I slam my weight into one side of my mortar then immediately shift my balance onto my other foot, causing the entire bowl to rock. I clatter into the Baba Yaga’s vessel, which wasn’t my intention but which sends her staggering and interrupts her flow of magical pestilence, so that’s not a bad result. My true objective is to unbalance my mortar to the extent that it tips over in mid-air, and when I achieve that – with a rush of flaming air, and a sudden sense of weightlessness – I deposit my vessel into place directly on top of the witch’s bowl, using my pestle as a rudder.

The two mortars lock into place with an echoing ring of stone on stone that chimes like a cathedral bell, one bowl above and the other below, the twin pestles contained inside and smashing against one another to produce an eddy of fist-sized stone chips. The witch and I are also enclosed, together, one hideous face to another. My flame illuminates the interior of what is now a wildly spinning, out-of-control stone sphere.

The Baba Yaga shrieks and reaches for me. My eye sockets burn.

“BITCH,” I snarl, “PUT A GODDAMN ROCK IN IT.”

And that’s exactly what I do, snatching up one of the swirling stone splinters that are flying about our heads and embedding it in the witch’s mouth with such force that her jaw explodes in three different directions at once. I then grab her by the hair as she vomits and chokes on her own blood, and I open her up; I draw the deeply entrenched blade of rock lengthways down her throat and along her clavicle, down through her gut and finally out, separating the bone and flesh of her entire upper torso like I’m unthreading the zip of a particularly revolting catsuit.

The Baba Yaga’s outer body comes apart in my hands in two robes of stinking meat, and her blood and intestines spill free. Then I set her on fire.

The explosion of bodily gasses ignited by hellfire causes the two mortars to come apart, and for a moment or two I’m falling, questioning the wisdom of what I just did and wondering if it’ll hurt when I hit the ground – indeed, wondering if it’s possible for me to die twice. But then my flaming mortar glides beneath me to collect me in mid-air, like Ali Baba’s magic carpet (and, yes, I am so wanting a hellfire-propelled magic carpet now; I’m the kind of girl who’s just never satisfied). Instantly I’m somewhere between pilot and passenger once more, sailing on through the night. The only sign of the combusted Baba Yaga is a curtain of fiery particles in my wake, like a miniature aurora borealis to mark my passage.

The Spirit of Vengeance is a force of nature – otherworldly nature – whose mission is to administer penance. I know this. What I’ve just delivered was retribution and then violent, bloody execution. What I am now then is something different to the Ghost Rider; a spirit of punishment as much as vengeance, and, in some way, of hope. I unwittingly answered the prayers of a desperate child.

If it happened once… can it happen again?

I return to the Baba Yaga’s nightmarish cottage, which does indeed support itself on chicken legs and also squats upon a nest of scorpions, centipedes, earwigs and black widow spiders, which the Slavic legends chose to leave out, probably wisely so. I revisit the eleven children in the cellar and release them from their cage with a combination of fire and brute strength. I then lead them from their private version of hell, a hell that will likely stay with them for however long they choose to live thereafter.

Can any mind survive such an experience? I’ve saved these poor wretches in body, but in soul…

“Skeleton lady?”

I look down at the girl who summoned me, Anya, through eye sockets of purest black. She stares up, then reaches out a hand.

“Thank you,” she says, softly. “For answering.”

Some of the others, the ones who’ll hopefully make some kind of recovery, nod in agreement. I’d smile if I could. Maybe. Or maybe I’d cry for them.

“ANY TIME,” I say. And I mean it.

And then I load them all into my flaming mortar and set off once again into the night, taking these little ones far from here, to somewhere there’ll be safe – hopefully – and where perhaps people will care for them better than their parents did and will love them for who they are.

I try not to look down at the forest as we pass, and to wonder how many other black cottages on chicken legs are hidden out there, with Baba Yaga cackling and feasting and grinding up the bones when they’re done.

But, hell.

I’m more than happy to come back and put them out of their misery some time soon…

“Thou hast performed a valiant service, Rebecca Lockwood.”

Hela is languishing in a throne that seems designed not only to support her serpentine body in unique comfort but also to shape, caress and accentuate it in every possible fashion. It’s really quite distracting, and not at all welcome. At all. Sincerely.

Just… not.

“What do you care?” I ask. “You just want me gone, right? You’ve shown me what I can do, what I can still be. Thank you. I think. But, whatever, I’ll just be on my way, and-”

“I apologize. I have acted… rashly.”

My eyes narrow. My real eyes, not those of Vengeance. Back here, in Hel, I’m just Becky; a willowy, slightly in need of regular exercise, pretty in a vulnerable way brunette with eyes the color of ice in whisky. A woman, but not a woman. Et cetera.

Seriously, I’m thinking Niffleheim needs some men. Men and cigarette vending machines. Sweetheart, that’s your Heaven right there.

Hela leans forward in her throne, her headdress fluttering and her eyes bright in the slits of her mask.

“I would offer thee sanctuary, Rebecca,” she breathes. “If thou would accept in spirit.”

My eyes narrow still further.

“Why? What’s in it for you?”

“To slake my curiosity. To… study thee.”

And she looks me up and down. Which… uh. Yeah, okay, so uncomfortable now, thank you.

“And,” Hela continues, “because thou hast nowhere else to go, mortal; at least, nowhere that offers the safety of my realm. From here thou can indulge the whims of thy inner spirit at thy leisure, and in turn learn more about thy hidden self as I learn more about thee.”

I clasp my hands. I want to say no, I truly do. I’m not stupid. But…

To coin a phrase, this isn’t Kansas any more. And what else am I supposed to do?

“I don’t trust you, Hela.”

“A wise assessment, Rebecca Lockwood.”

“This could end very badly.”

“Aye.”

I purse my lips. She smiles the smile of the beautiful dead.

“I’m going to regret this,” I murmur.

And then, with a deep breath, I give her my answer.

What happens after that…

…well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?

Author’s Note

I find it touching that people still remember Becky.

I’ve been writing fanfiction for seven years or so now, somewhere close to two hundred issues of various series, and I reckon Rebecca Lockwood is the character who’s been greeted with the most genuine affection in all that time. Looking back on my seven issues of Ghost Rider I don’t think the overall story was any great shakes, but Becky was a keeper. Something with her just clicked. I was sad when she died, weird as that sounds, but at the time that was her story and it ended the only way it really could.

That said, revisiting her here for one more dance… that seemed right too. I was startled to find that I slipped right back into her voice without a blink, and this story just burned its way onto the screen ridiculously quickly.

I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane as much as I did, and keep your eyes peeled for more Rebecca Lockwood, Spirit Of Vengeance – horror with an Asgardian twist – in the pages of Marvel Omega Presents, coming soon!

~ Meriades Rai