We passed a cell that was full of gallon-size glass jars containing captured Supreme Evil Beings. They were small, wraithlike objects about the size and texture of well-used dish cloths, only less substantial, and they spent most of the time bickering over who was the most supreme Supreme Evil Being. But we weren’t here to bother with SEBs; Spike led me on to a cell right at the end of the corridor and opened the door. Sitting on a chair in the middle of the room was a man in jeans and a plain leather jacket. He was staring at the floor with the light on above, so I couldn’t at first see his face, and his large and well-manicured hands were clenched tightly in front of him. I also noticed that his ankle was attached to the floor by a sturdy chain. I winced. Spike would have to be right about this one-imprisonment of something actually human was definitely illegal and could be seriously bad for business.
“Hey!” said Spike and the figure slowly raised his head to look at me. I recognized him instantly and not without a certain degree of alarm. It was Felix8, Acheron Hades’ henchman from way back in the days of the Jane Eyre adventure. Hades had taken the face from the first Felix when he died and implanted it on a suitable stranger who’d been bent to his evil will. Whenever a Felix died, which was quite often, he just swapped the face. Felix8’s real name was Danny Chance, but his freewill had been appropriated by Hades-he was merely an empty vessel, devoid of pity or morals. His life had no meaning other than to do his master’s bidding. The point now was, his master had died sixteen years ago, and the last time I saw Felix8 was at the Penderyn Hotel in Merthyr, the capital of the Welsh Socialist Republic.
Felix8 looked at me with a slight sense of amusement and gave a subtle nod of greeting.
“Where did you find him?” I asked.
“Outside your place half an hour ago. He had this on him.” Spike showed me an ugly-looking machine pistol with a delicately carved stock. “There was a single round in the chamber.”
I bent down to Felix8’s level and stared at him for a moment. “Who sent you?”
Felix8 smiled, said nothing and looked at the chain that was firmly clasped around his ankle.
“What do you want?”
Still Felix8 said nothing.
“Where have you been these past sixteen years?”
All my questions were met with blank insolence, and after five minutes of this I walked back outside the cell block, Spike at my side.
“Who reported him?” I asked.
“Your stalker-what’s his name again?”
“Millon.”
“Right. He thought Felix8 might have been another stalker and was going to warn him off, but when he noticed the absence of notebooks, cameras or even a duffel coat, he called me.”
I thought for a moment. If Felix8 was back on my trail, then somebody in the Hades family was looking for revenge-and they were big on revenge. I’d had run-ins with the Hades family before, and I thought they’d learned their lesson by now. I had personally defeated Acheron, Aornis and Cocytus, which left only Lethe and Phlgethon. Lethe was the “white sheep” of the family and spent most of his time doing charity work, which left only Phlgethon, who had dropped off the radar in the mid-nineties, despite numerous manhunts by SO-5 and myself.
“What do you suggest?” I asked. “He doesn’t fall into any of the categories that might ethically give us a reason to keep him under lock and key without trial of some sort. After all, he’s only wearing the face of Felix-under there he’s an erased Danny Chance, married father of two who went missing in 1985.”
“I agree we can’t keep him,” replied Spike, “but if we let him go he’ll just try to kill you.”
“I live to be over a hundred,” I murmured. “I know-I’ve met the future me.”
It was said without much conviction. I’d seen enough of time’s paradoxical nature to know that meeting the future me wasn’t any guarantee of a long life.
“We’ll keep him for twenty-four hours,” I announced. “I’ll make a few inquiries and see if I can figure out which Hades is involved-if any. He might be simply trying to carry out the last order he was given. After all, he was under orders to kill me, but no one said anything about when.”
“Thursday…?” began Spike in a tone that I recognized and didn’t like.
“No,” I said quickly. “Out of the question.”
“The only reason he’d mind being killed,” said Spike in an annoyingly matter-of-fact way, “is that it would mean he failed to carry out his mission-to kill you.”
“I hear you, Spike, but he’s done nothing wrong. Give me a day, and if I can’t find anything, we’ll hand him over to Braxton.”
“Okay, then,” replied Spike, with a sulky air of disappointment.
“Another thing,” I said as we returned to the carpet storeroom. “My uncle Mycroft has returned as a ghost.”
“It happens,” replied Spike with a shrug. “Did he seem substantial?”
“As you or I.”
“How long was he materialized for?”
“Seven minutes, I guess.”
“Then you got him at first haunting. First-timers are always the most solid.”
“That might be so, but I’d like to know why.”
“I’m owed a few favors by the Realm of the Dead,” he said offhandedly, “so I can find out. By the way, have you told Landen about all this crazy SpecOps shit?”
“I’m telling him this evening.”
“Sure you are.”
I walked back to my office, locked the door and changed out of the less-than-appealing Acme Carpets uniform and put on something more comfortable. I would have to speak to Aornis Hades about Felix8, but she would probably tell me to go and stick it in my ear-after all, she was seven years into a thirty-year enloopment based on my testimony, and yours truly was unlikely to fill her evil little soul with any sort of heartwarming benevolence.
I finished lacing my boots, locked the door, refilled my water bottle and placed it in the shoulder bag. Acme Carpets might have been a cover for my clandestine work at SpecOps, but this itself was cover for another job that only Bowden knew about. If Landen found out about SpecOps, he’d be annoyed-if he found out about Jurisfiction, he’d go bonkers. Not long after the Minotaur’s attack following the ’88 SuperHoop, Landen and I had a heart-to-heart where I told him I was giving up Jurisfiction-my primary duty being wife and mother. And so it was agreed. Unfortunately, my other primary duty was to fiction-the make-believe. Unable to reconcile the two, I did both and lied a bit-well, a lot, actually-to plaster over the gaping crack in my loyalties. It wasn’t with an easy or light heart, but it had worked for the past fourteen years. The odd thing was, Jurisfiction didn’t earn me a penny and was dangerous and wildly unpredictable. There was another reason I liked it, too-it brought me into close contact with story. It would have been easier to get a registered cheesehead off a five-times-a-day Limburger habit than to keep me away from fiction. But, hey-I could handle it.