Matt Archer: Legend (4 page)

I sat up straighter. What if they had been after this
scientist and the kidnapped Iroquois were just collateral damage or being taken
for some other purpose? If that was the case, then maybe the monsters here
weren’t after a Canadian shaman or tribal leader after all.

Maybe this Dr. Burton-Hughes had brought them with her.

I stood, hoping to cut this meeting short so I could discuss
it with Parker and caught Dr. Longtree staring at me with blazing green eyes. A
warning buzz ran down my arms and I drew my knife just as she sprung over the
table with unnatural speed.

Dr. Longtree leapt across the room and slammed into me. Her
fingers wrapped around my neck, squeezing tight enough to bruise. The room
erupted into frantic motion, but I came to my own rescue. With a quick slice, I
cut a tiny gash in her pinkie. I wasn’t sure why I did that instead of taking
her out, but sometimes the knife called the shots.

It worked, too. The weird light in her eyes went dark and
she collapsed on top of me, completely limp. I rolled her to the floor,
scrambling back when black mist oozed out of her nostrils, ears and mouth.

“What is
that
?” Bill squeaked. He and Dr. Barnes
pressed themselves against the bookcases, as if all that old knowledge could
protect them somehow.

“No idea.” I watched the mist float to the ceiling and
coalesce briefly into a ball before the sunlight coming in above the curtains touched
it. With a screech, the ball disappeared.

 Lieutenant Johnson whistled, and nodded at the professors.
“Do you think you can get some kind of field research credit for this? You’ll
probably get published.”

Dr. Barnes and Bill both gaped at him.

Academics…they had no sense of humor.

Dr. Longtree, who was really nice once she wasn’t possessed,
decided to take the rest of the day off after the mist incident. She couldn’t
remember coming to the conference room at all and it freaked her out.

“I remember getting up at seven, then I was here, on the
floor.” She shivered. “My whole morning is a giant blank.”

Will, always the optimist, knelt beside her and patted her
shoulders, “I think you’re probably safe now. Once we’re gone, they won’t need
you anymore.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Longtree murmured, staring at
the ceiling where the mist had evaporated. “My work has taken me to some
strange places. Maybe I need to rethink my career.”

I thought that was a pretty good idea, but decided it would
be rude to say so.

Bill offered to drive Dr. Longtree home and the meeting was
over. Two days in Ontario, and all we had to show for it was one star tattoo, a
rock monster attack, a demon possession, and a story about a missing physicist.
Not much to go on.

“It makes no sense,” I said to Will on the ride back to the
hotel. Parker drove, and Johnson called shotgun, so we were being chauffeured
in the backseat like a pair of six-year-olds. My knees were practically up to
my chin.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Will asked.

I slumped, fighting off a headache. I didn’t like failure,
and this trip had been a huge waste of time. “Why would the demons or monsters
or whatever else is lurking in Canada steal a handful of Iroquois leaders, then
take this physicist?”

Will rolled down his window and leaned out far enough to let
his hair blow in the wind. “No idea.”

“What if she’s the one they were after?” I asked.
“Seriously, dude, think about it. There were monsters east of Perth a few years
ago, and now Canada’s being attacked for the first time.”

“Or it might be a coincidence. Perth is hundreds of miles
away from that part of the Outback, man,” he said, yawning. “Plus, the monsters
seem to go after people with a connection to a knife—you and Jorge—so it would
be more logical for the monsters to chase other shamans who could create
something powerful to stop them. But a physicist? What can they do except bore
people at parties?”

I wracked my brain for a smart answer to Will’s question and
came up totally blank. There had to be more to this story. Maybe I should tell
Mamie about it—she always figured stuff out. And as luck with have it, she was
home from college for the weekend.

* * *

I dragged myself through the garage late on Saturday
afternoon. Will honked from the road, then took off for home in his BMW. He
refused to be seen in my used Honda, so we rode in the Beemer as a regular
course of action when we went anywhere together.

Now that my ops weren’t secret, at least to my family, Mom
had stopped meeting us at the airport unless one of us came back injured. A few
bruises and sprains didn’t count—she reserved the chauffer service for broken
bones and serious internal injuries. It was weird how quickly my job had
switched from “Oh, my God, you’re going to get my
baby
killed!” to “Be
careful, sweetheart. See you in a week.”

I shouldn’t complain, though. Mom hadn’t made me quit the
team, even after I almost bought it during our last op in Afghanistan. True,
Uncle Mike and I didn’t tell her everything, especially not about me being
poisoned, but she took my injured knee in stride. Well, sort of…which was why I
remained stuck in school rather than hanging with Uncle Mike and Aunt Julie at
the Pentagon.

After dumping my duffel bag on the washing machine, I
followed the smell of pot roast into the kitchen. My stomach felt like a pocket
that had been turned out for loose change; the first order of business was
food. I had the cover off the crock pot, fork poised to grab a big hunk of
meat, when I was very rudely interrupted.

“Stop right there, mister.”

Mom stood in the doorway, hands on her hips.

I lowered the fork and said, “What, no ‘welcome home?’”

She chuckled and came to give me a hug. Mom wasn’t a short
woman, but the top of her head was even with my collarbone and her short,
shaggy brown hair tickled my nose. “Welcome home. Dinner’s almost ready, but
Mamie and I actually want to eat, so I’m not about to turn you loose with an
entire pot roast. We’d end up foraging for scraps.”

Mom let me go, but before I could make excuses for my
attempted food-burglary, my sister flew into the kitchen with a shriek. Mamie hugged
me so hard, I nearly fell over, taking her with me.

“I missed you, too, sis,” I said, trying to draw a breath.
“Try not to suffocate me, okay?”

She let me go, her dark blue eyes shining—Archer blue, the
same color as mine and our brother’s…a color we all inherited from our Dad.
Wherever he was. I couldn’t decide if it was easier or harder knowing that he
was a spy for the CIA rather than a deadbeat, which was the story Mom told us
for years before finally revealing the truth last fall. Either way, he left
right after I was born—at Mom’s request—and I didn’t know him at all.

“Anything new?” Mamie asked, quivering with excitement and
derailing my bitter thought-train.

“Yes, Sherlock, a few things,” I said. “But it might be nice
for you and Mom to worry over my scrapes and bruises and ask how I am before
worming details out of me or nagging me about stealing pot roast.”

I was teasing, but my mother and sister took smothering me
with concern very seriously. They dragged me into the living room, deposited me
on the recliner in front of the fireplace and made a fuss over my injuries.
Honestly, it was a game to all of us, considering I’d come home pretty much
unscathed this time, but I knew if anything really serious happened to me, Mom
would go all mother-dragon on Uncle Mike for enlisting me in the Army (even if
it was the knife’s fault). And my sister? Mamie—whose brilliance and tenacity
terrified nearly every man in my unit—would make Colonel Black rue the day he
first heard the name Matt Archer.

Mamie twisted one of her pigtails around her finger over and
over, her way of telling me that I better start talking soon or she’d carve a
laser-hole in my forehead with her eyes. Now that she was a college girl, her
one concession to becoming an adult was to stop wearing ribbons on the ends of
her braids. Since the pigtails seemed like a good way to discourage frat guys
from asking her out, I wholeheartedly approved her stubborn refusal to wear her
hair down. She was also still wearing the sapphire earrings I gave her for
graduation—another thing she refused to change. I liked that, too.

“So how’s school going?” I asked, just to mess with her.

My sister crossed her arms. “You’re stalling.”

“That’s my cue to leave, I guess.” Mom laughed and stood.
“I’ll let Mamie grill you, Matt—she’s better at it. I should put dinner on the
table before you decide to
eat
the table.”

My stomach growled loudly. “Good idea.”

Once Mom was out of earshot, Mamie gestured for me to sit
with her on the couch. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. It was supposed to be a research trip, but Will and I
got ambushed by two fourteen-feet-tall rock monsters.”

I proceeded to fill her in on everything: the minion’s
warning about the blood-red moon, Dr. Longtree’s possession, and especially
about the missing physicist. “I’m thinking the demons or monsters or whatever
came for her, not the Iroquois. Maybe they needed the others for something
else, but I think the primary objective was this Dr. Burton-Hughes.”

Mamie had that faraway look in her eyes, the one that said,
“data compile in progress.” I leaned my head back on a couch cushion and
watched the flames dance in the fireplace while she worked things out.
Considering how accurate her research had been over the last two years, I
trusted her more than anyone in the military. More even than Aunt Julie, and
she worked in Military Intelligence. Mamie just had this ability to figure
things out when no one else could.

“I think you’re onto something, Matt,” Mamie said, coming
out of her data-crunch trance. “Maybe Dr. Burton-Hughes was close to making a
very important discovery—kind of like Jorge. Maybe she found a new connection
between science and the occult like Jorge did and she needed to be eliminated.”

“So what could it be?” I asked. “She was supposedly
studying…uh, I think the guy said theoretical…” What was it that Bill had said
again? “Um…dark energy! Yeah, that’s the thing.”

“Dark Energy,” Mamie said, emphasizing each word like it was
capitalized. “So, I’m taking honors Physics this semester—”

I grunted out a laugh. “Only you would take honors anything
in your first semester of school.”

“Bite me, Matthew.”

I laughed harder. “Listen to you, saying such crude
things…college is a bad influence.”

Mamie’s forehead furrowed, sending her glasses slipping down
her nose. “
Anyway
, I learned a lot about light and dark. Dark isn’t just
the absence of light.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s where the bogeyman lives.”

“Maybe, but that’s not what I mean.” She pushed her glasses
up and assumed her “I’m teaching you something” stance. “Dark has substance. It
exists
in the truest sense of the word. Dark matter and dark energy have
power and gravity of their own.”

I scrunched up my forehead. “But it’s…darkness. How can it
have substance?”

“A black hole is dark, and it has substance. You wouldn’t
want to get too close to one, right?” she insisted. “Dark matter is very weak.
It’s almost impossible to catch, but it’s there. I won’t bore you with the
details, but scientists estimate twenty-five percent of space is made up of the
stuff.”

“And the other seventy-five percent is regular matter?”

Mamie gave me an exasperated look. “When you look at the
night sky, what fills up most of the space?”

It wasn’t much fun looking stupid, but I’d tolerate it for
Mamie. “Darkness.”

“Right, only five percent of the observable universe is
actually matter as we know it: stars, rocks, dust. With me so far?” I nodded,
and she said, “That leaves us with seventy percent unaccounted for. It’s not
just empty space, so
something
has to be out there. Which leads us to dark
energy. My professor believes dark energy is real, even if it’s not understood
or really provable yet.” She paused, lips pursed, probably looking for words small
enough for me to follow. “You know that the universe is expanding, right?”

I nodded. I wasn’t
that
undereducated.

“Good. So if it’s expanding, why do the galaxies themselves
stay together in clusters?”

Shrugging, I said, “Stars? Gravitational pull?”

“Yes, somewhat, but the reason they’re shaped like spirals
and discs and stuff is because dark matter is imposing an additional weak gravity
on them. Black holes probably are too, but that’s a whole other topic, and they
were stars once anyway.”

My eyes were glazing over. “And the big deal is…?”

She chuckled. “If galaxies are held together by the gravity
of the stars and super-massive black holes and dark matter, why is the universe
expanding rather than contracting? And not only expanding, but expanding at an
ever increasing rate.” Mamie paused, as if she really thought I’d try to answer
that questions. When I didn’t, she said, “The only answer? Some other force is
pulling everything apart.”

Then it dawned on me, what she was trying to say. “Dark energy
is trying to rip apart the universe?”

“Assuming the theories are correct, it’s a possibility,” she
said, her eyes gleaming with the academic fervor that gripped her when she
solved a new puzzle. “Dark matter tries to help hold light together, strangely
enough. Dark energy pulls it apart. And it’s incredibly strong, Matt. Much
stronger than the stars and dark matter. In a way, it’s at war with everything
else in the universe.”

A shiver ran down my back at the thought of sentient darkness.
Like the Shadow Man: it was living, seething darkness, too. We had always
talked about Good and Evil in abstract terms. But what if Mamie said was right
and the Master of our enemies was universal, in the truest sense of the word? What
chance did we stand in a war if we had to fight the forces of the cosmos
itself?