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Chapter 195 – The Gathering StormBuffy Summers let the police work their way over to her. The younger one said, “Miss Summers, we need to handcuff you and take you to the precinct house.”
She pretended she wasn’t totally upset. “Well …” She peeked at his nametag. Winters. Well, that went with ‘Summers’. “Officer Winters, I think you two need to give me your hands and let me skate the two of you off the ice first, so no one slips on the ice and falls and gets hurt. Okay? And you may need to let me change shoes, because you’re gonna want these skates for forensics, right?”
Both officers looked at the carnage on the ice and quickly agreed.
She smiled. “And there’s no way I can walk barefoot across the parking lot to your car. Right?”
So the cops let her take their hands and skate them over to the boards. And there was just a crazy number of people there taking pictures of her and holding out autograph books and shouting stuff.
“Buffy! We love you!”
“Buffy! That was the most amazing thing ever!”
“Buffy, I saw you compete when you were ten! You’re still the best!”
She was kind of shocked that these people had seen her hack four guys to bits and they still thought she wasn’t a monster.
She announced, “I can’t sign any autographs now, because the officers need to handcuff me and arrest me and stuff, but it would be really great if one of you could call my lawyer, Manny Goldstein?” She even reeled off Manny’s office phone number and got the policemen to say where they were going to take her, in case someone was really on the ball.
* * *
Maggie Walsh looked at the coded message. Perfect. Her people had extricated Vince Carter so smoothly the prison system still had no idea he had escaped.
Atron hadn’t cared one way or another what happened to Vince Carter, but Maggie was fully aware what feeble conclusions the police would leap to if Vince Carter was seen performing any criminal acts in Paradise Valley … like kidnapping the Mack family. The authorities would assume that Danielle Atron was behind the crime. That suited Maggie perfectly.
Maggie intended to let Atron have a completely fair shot at Terawatt. After all, if Danielle took down Terawatt, that would solve a great many of The Collective’s problems. Maggie had provided Danielle with everything the acquisitive bitch had requested, and a few things she hadn’t thought of.
Danielle was a reasonably intelligent woman and a good biochemist, but she thought like a businesswoman. Terawatt thought like a scientist, which was considerably more dangerous as far as Maggie was concerned. Taking Danielle out would be a lot easier than taking Terawatt out. Especially if Danielle believed that the power armor and all the weaponry was under the control of one Danielle Atron, instead of Maggie’s people.
Meanwhile, Maggie was still computing the likelihoods and options, and she was coming up with a reasonable chance that Terawatt would finish off Atron instead. Once that happened, the Macks would be Maggie’s ace in the hole. If Maggie wasted her time playing poker.
Danielle Atron had spent so much time trying to figure out who in Paradise Valley could be Terawatt, and how Alex Mack could know her well enough to get those first pictures. Maggie agreed that the pictures had been planned, because a good sound bite like that was planned, not spontaneous. It just came across better if it looked spontaneous.
But Maggie had become suspicious when none of the NID’s ‘Terawatt suspects’ lived in Paradise Valley. So she had done her own research. And someone had tampered with the picture of Alexandra Louise Mack that was in the official NSA and CIA databases. That was really all the evidence that Maggie had needed, but she had taken interview footage of A.L. Mack and compared that against Terawatt. There was no doubt in Maggie’s mind that Alex Mack still had her powers after all these years, and was now Terawatt. Furthermore, Alex Mack came from a family that was highly intelligent, and also encouraged learning in their children. George Mack had a Master’s and a Ph.D. Barbara Mack had a Master’s and in Maggie’s opinion would probably begin work on a Ph.D. once she no longer had children to raise. Annie Mack was undoubtedly one of the bright spots at M.I.T. according to her teachers, and would end up with at least one Master’s and at least one Ph.D. Alex Mack had earned all ‘A’s on an all-AP course schedule this past year, had earned a respectable 2210 on her SATs, and had evaded Atron’s best efforts for nearly four solid years.
Alex Mack was Terawatt. Alex Mack was smarter than people assumed. And once Maggie had Terawatt’s family held hostage, Alex would do what she wanted, or watch her family suffer the consequences.
Maggie also had plans in play to handle Sergeant Carlson and Captain Miller and Lieutenant Valentine as well. Finn? Maggie had a substantial file on Dr. Samantha Finn’s childhood, so she thought there was a high likelihood she could talk Samantha around and indirectly force Colonel Finn’s hand, assuming he survived the next day or so …
* * *
Riley hung up the phone. The Belize police had found that someone had entered the Rosenberg-O’Neill honeymoon suite and had a fight. There were damaged pieces of furniture. There was blood in several places on the floor and on the base of a pole lamp. And quick patch tests had shown that the blood was human and two different blood types: AB- and B-. He knew that neither of the blood types found was Willow’s or the general’s because Janet had that information on hand.
If the Collective still had that ‘alive only’ bounty on the general, and had been trying to co-opt Willow, that suggested that they had sent in forces to capture them alive … and someone had put up a fight. Still, he had to assume that the Collective now had both of them.
First, he tried Alex’s tPhone. No answer. He reluctantly dialed Mrs. Mack. “Mrs. Mack? This is Riley Finn.”
She answered, “This isn’t a good time or place.” She sounded pretty tense.
He sighed inwardly. “I really was hoping to talk to your daughter, even though she had a little chat with the general.”
She insisted, “That’s not an option for a while. Maybe not for a really long time. Don’t you have alternatives?” She paused and added, “You’re a huge magazine. You have to have plenty of photojournalists on your own payroll.”
Great. She was being overheard. He admitted, “Yes, ma’am, but no one I trust to pull our fat out of the fire. The general and his bride just went missing.”
“Oh, my … gosh. All right, I’ll try to talk to her, but assume she’s unavailable for now. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
He hung up. He knew this could be a lot worse, but this was just looking increasingly bad. At least Hanna and Grover were on the base, and each of his teams had at least one other superhero they were keeping in contact with.
He pressed a speed-dial button on the deskphone.
“Major Carter here.”
“Major, grab your sergeants if they’re in the building, plus Winkelman and Tang, and come here ASAP.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then he hit another speed-dial button.
“Sergeant Walter Harriman.”
“Sergeant, this is Finn. Please start full mobilization protocols. We’re going to need to move fast, once we can figure out where we’re moving. And I want full paperwork for General Hammond, including everything I should be filling out.”
“Yes, sir. Is it all right if I put the base on full alert in case there’s another Evil Empire maneuver?”
“That would be excellent, sergeant.”
He dialed Team Two.
“Captain Miller here, colonel. What’s happened?”
He grimaced. “We have reason to believe they grabbed the general and Willow. They also took out our support personnel in Belize. I want you to stay on the line for a conference call, but pull Lupo and Carlson in if they’re available. I’ve got people coming on foot, and I’m going to call Gates and Lorne.”
“Roger that, sir.”
* * *
Batman studied the sample under the microscope. He ground his molars. He didn’t want to do this, but it looked like he had very few other options that were anywhere near as good.
He dialed the SRI.
“Department of Homeland Security’s HWAAA program, Sergeant Walter Harriman speaking. How may I help you, Batman?”
He didn’t like that they had him identified just from the phone number, since he was doing some re-routing to avoid easy traces. But on the other hand, having competent people on the other end of this line was a good thing. He knew there was no point in asking to speak to O’Neill. Not when the man was on his honeymoon. He tried, “I need to speak to Terawatt immediately.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but … Oh, hell. The general said you have clearance to know this if it came up. When we lost Pyre, Terawatt announced she was retiring. She insisted she couldn’t do the job anymore.”
He growled, “Then who can I talk to?”
“Colonel Finn, who’s on a conference call, but if you’re willing to participate in the call, you can speak to him.”
He couldn’t wait. He was going to have to trust Finn, even if the man was an Orphan. Another Orphan. He had worked out that Terawatt trusted Finn enough to suggest him as an emergency double for Batman or possibly even for Bruce Paine. “Please let me join the conference call.”
He listened as Harriman talked to Finn and Finn eagerly thanked Harriman for the idea.
“Riley Finn here, sir. We have a crisis, and you may be able to help. We have reason to believe that The Collective kidnapped General O’Neill and Willow Rosenberg, while killing their protection.”
It looked like he had made the optimal choice. He growled, “It’s not just O’Neill and Rosenberg.” Granted, he wasn’t yet convinced that both of them were on the right side. It would be extremely easy for one of them to use that honeymoon as a way of kidnapping the other. However, that would almost certainly mean that they were ready for some sort of master stroke, or else it would be a lot smarter to continue playing the wholesome hero. “Two Orphans just tried to kidnap Bruce Paine. They brought along a new supervillain and two local hitters.”
Harriman cut in, “And I just got a heads-up that our supervillain jail was just isolated and destroyed. First investigators on-site report massive tactical strikes from the outside working inward. All the guards appear to be dead, and over half the inmates, too. Not found were Clare Tobias, Poison Ivy and her plants, Psych, Bane, plus two of Terawatt’s foes: a telekinetic and an electrokinetic. The other Orphans we have in SuperMax prisons around the rest of the country appear to all be in place, but I’ll have DHS verify that.”
Finn snapped, “We need to check on the other unaffiliated Orphans we know.”
Batman growled, “You know there are more out there, and you just left them there?”
Finn firmly replied, “Yes, sir. Just as we left you there. Given that the next biggest threats are television starlet Buffy Summers and two pro athletes, they’re not exactly menacing anyone, or even trying to fly under the radar.”
* * *
Manuel Goldstein, of Pressman, Goldstein, Mandelbaum, Goldstein and Associates, made sure he had his client in his car with the doors closed and the tinted windows all the way up before he let her say anything. After all there had been maybe eighty paparazzi and three hundred Buffy fans waiting for her to come out of the police station. Or in some cases, perhaps waiting for her not to get to walk out of the police station.
Buffy Summers insisted, “Look Manny, I really, really appreciate you dropping everything and rushing over her to save my petite derriere, but I have to make this call. And you may not want to know who I’m calling.”
He glanced over as he pulled out into traffic. Not only had twenty-seven different Buffy fans called him to tell him she was in need of his legal assistance, but he’d gotten a panicked call from her boyfriend who seemed to think she was under attack by supervillains and also she had superpowers. If she really had taken out three Orphans and a local legbreaker for hire with nothing but ice dancing skills, maybe she did have superpowers. He said, “Ms. Summers, as your lawyer let me advise you not to perform any illegal acts or incite anyone else to do so.”
She gave him that perky smile that he assumed was an act. “Oh, this isn’t illegal. The problem is it’s the complete opposite of illegal.”
He concentrated on driving. “The opposite of illegal is simply … legal.”
“Yeah, this is legal, but it’s not so simple.”
She typed a number from memory, which told him she hadn’t entered it as one of the contacts on her phone. She listened for a couple seconds, and then said, “I need to talk to Terawatt. Now. She said I could call her anytime.”
Buffy Summers was calling Terawatt? This made no sense. How was some B-list starlet on Terawatt’s contact list? And why hadn’t Buffy used that as a lever to get a better deal on her upcoming reality show?
There was another pause, and she scowled. “Okay, so who can I talk to?” She tapped the dashboard with one polished nail. “Okay, I don’t know him, but I’ve got stuff I need to tell you guys.”
Buffy gave Manny a little frown. “She really did say I could call her, and now they’re telling me she’s out of action.”
She focused again on the phone. “Oh, hi! Yeah, this is Buffy Summers. I hate to interrupt big-time important conference call stuff, but three Orphans and some local hitter just tried to kidnap me. I mean, that’s what the police confirmed. I guessed the three Orphans and one not.” She paused as she listened. “Oh, no, they all ate ice. Two dead, two off to a prison hospital. I tricked ’em into following me out on an ice skating rink, and I showed ’em why ice dancing is a real sport. I’m probably never gonna get all the blood off the leather, and they’re my favorite ice dancing boots.”
She listened patiently for a few more seconds, and then she said, “Okay. Thanks.”
She turned to face Manny. “I talked to a Colonel Finn. The DHS is gonna put in a good word for me. It turns out the Evil Empire is pulling shit like this all over the place today. And they said I’m already all over YouTube and Reddit.” Then she sighed. “And when Freddie hits me with a big court injunction, I’m gonna need you to defend me. I mean, he’s never gonna want to see me again, so I guess I just … stay away from him. And his friends. And his family. I … I can do that.”
But there were tears streaming down her face. And Buffy Summers was not the world’s greatest actress.
* * *
Batman growled, “This looks like the prelude to a large-scale maneuver.”
Finn disagreed. “Or it could be that we’re seeing the primary maneuver, and they’ll just consolidate and see if we can counter their tactics.”
Carter added, “But all these maneuvers have to be predicated on having locations to move their kidnap victims to. And Willow already put together a chart on that, with the IT staff.”
Professor Jeremy Winkelman cleared his throat slightly. “We already knew from the areas of control of the other blocs that their base wasn’t on the Indian subcontinent, or in North America. Their attack patterns suggest that their primary base couldn’t be in North America, or Europe, or most of Asia, or central Africa, or any coastal city on the planet. That ruled out every city that the India bloc targeted. So that told us that the primary bloc has a base which wouldn’t be threatened in a massive global thermonuclear war that involved the top eight nuclear nations. That left us with non-coastal South America, Saharan Africa, non-coastal Australia, some small areas of Asia, subsurface bases, and possibly Antarctica.”
Batman insisted, “But I had the chance to perform some forensic work after I captured those two Orphans. There were plant fibers on the cuffs of one’s pants, and there were mineral fragments embedded in the other’s soles. The crystals are definitely quartz arenite. The fibers are from rare vines that are endemic to the Guiana Highlands.”
Finn muttered, “Those tepui from the Paine exhibit. Someone was paying attention when the museum set up that exhibit, and they could have pulled in Poison Ivy specifically to keep people from looking harder at the area the exhibit came from.”
Batman agreed: “And who would know better about Poison Ivy’s research and current abilities than her major professor who taught her how to splice her own DNA with plants?”
Carter added, “But if they’re picking up quartz arenites, they’d have to be on top of a tepui or around the base of one. And it would have to be one of the ‘inaccessible’ ones, or else they’d have geologists and eco-tourists and indigenous people all over their base.”
Batman growled, “The tepui that Paine Mining surveyed is listed as one of the inaccessible ones, but I verified through Bruce Paine’s personnel that it has been fully surveyed, and it’s clear.”
Finn asked, “And how many tepui are officially inaccessible but have been surveyed by Christakos Mining?”
He would have to remember that Finn was an Orphan and sharp enough to get promoted to lieutenant colonel. “Precisely three. I have the GPS coordinates for all three.” He transmitted the data to the SRI.
Professor Winkelman said, “We already pulled up some satellite images as soon as we saw where your line of deductions was going. So … what do we have?” He paused a second. “Okay. Two are definitely nothing but unmarred tepui with nothing going on. Not even in false color infrared. The third is tall enough and large enough and it appears to be under cloud cover. Not even the IR is showing anything interesting. Uh-oh … It’s under cloud cover in every single sat image we’ve got, which is really suspicious because these tepui should be under cloud cover less often than the surrounding highlands.”
Batman growled, “That’s the one. Now we just have to plan our move.”
Finn pointed out, “And they almost certainly have S-300 or S-400 anti-missile defenses up there, so we can’t just fly in twenty helos full of Army Rangers. We need an entry strategy.”
And he had an idea on that. So the first thing he needed to do was call Grover’s house.
* * *
Jack woke up. His head felt like someone had dumped out the stuff he called brains and replaced it with cotton candy.
And someone had just waved ammonia under his nose. He really hated that.
He opened his eyes. There was no point in trying to fake unconsciousness when they’d already pulled out the ammonia. He’d already twitched and coughed and given the whole thing away.
He was lying on a nice bed, in a nice room. There was even a nice window off to his left. Wherever he was, there was a hell of a lot of green way off in the distance and nothing resembling habitation.
He moved carefully. No handcuffs, no hospital restraints. And someone had dressed him in a t-shirt and shorts that looked like some of the clothes he’d brought along on the trip.
Someone with a sense of humor or really lousy luck, because they’d picked the t-shirt Willow told him not to bring. The one Charlie gave him for Christmas a couple years ago. In big letters it said ‘QUESTION AUTHORITY’. In smaller letters lined up underneath that, it said ‘wait a minute did you just do what I told you to?’
He carefully used his arms to sit up. On the other side of the room, an old man sat calmly in an armchair near the door. Two musclebound Orphans stood on either side of the man. Jack recognized the guy, even if he no longer wore that little beard.
Jack mentally kicked himself for not seriously considering this option, because he was looking at it now. Instead, he gave the guy his best poker face and said, “Hello, Doctor Locke. I’d say it’s a nice surprise, but it isn’t nice, and it isn’t actually a surprise. Or should I say ‘heil Helmut!’ instead?”
“Remarkable, general. Or do you mind if I call you Jack, since you’re already going with my birth name. It’s a real shame you are not more sympathetic to my Orphans.”
Jack pretended to complain, “Just how old is this cloning stuff anyway?”
Howard Royer Locke replied, “I believe you already know the answer to that one. And I also believe you have a rather different question that you would really rather ask.”
Jack had been holding back on that one, in the hopes that they wouldn’t use that as leverage. But it looked like they were ahead of him on this one, too. He went ahead and asked. “Okay. Fine. Then I’ll go ahead and mention it. Where the hell is my wife?”
* * *
Willow felt the hot light on her skin, and she tried not to move. But she was so uncomfortable, and her legs were cramping, and her shoulders hurt. And her head felt like crap, and she was pretty sure she had a burn on her ribcage from that stupid taser they’d hit her with, and she had a couple of scrapes and bruises from her fancy balcony-to-balcony escape that hadn’t worked out after all. And she was sweating all over from the hot lights.
She was naked. In a birdcage. Well, it was shaped like a birdcage but the wires that spread from the center point over her head were way thicker than that. And whoever stole her clothes and shoved her in here had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure she was extra uncomfortable. She was on the balls of her feet, but her legs were bent until her butt was touching her heels. And she was naked. And she couldn’t cover herself up any, because her wrists were trapped over her head.
She looked up and studied what was holding her forearms. They looked like a pair of steel bracers. She couldn’t see where they clamped shut and locked in place. She tried tugging on them, but it seemed like the stupid things were welded to the top of the birdcage. Or riveted. Something so there wasn’t any give.
There were four spotlights shining down on her, and they were hot enough that she was covered in sweat, even if she was starkers. Being naked with Jack was one thing. Being naked like this? Not of the okay.
She craned her neck behind her, and she nearly screamed. There was a dead body dumped on the concrete floor that was close enough that it caught enough of the spotlights. It was a dead woman with dyed red hair. She could see that someone had hacked the body to bits while leaving the face untouched. She felt a sudden urge to panic.
Someone had made the face and hair up so the body looked like her.
She put a dozen disparate facts together and came up with some pretty scary conclusions. She was at the secret base of the primary bloc. P$ychon4ut was also at that base. P$ychon4ut liked hurting women and had already been showing some of the behaviors that were often seen in the early stages of serial rapists or serial killers. P$ychon4ut had a personal grudge against the people who had worked together to put him in prison, and one of those people was Willow Rosenberg.
She was going to end up like that dead body, or maybe even worse, unless she did something really fast.
First thing: deal with the cramping in her legs which was just getting worse and worse all the time. She pulled on the cuffs holding her forearms and lifted herself up a couple of inches. Then she adjusted her aching legs and lowered herself until she was sitting in a seiza position. She could sit seiza for a pretty long time. Jack had been teaching her martial arts, along with the way more fun marital arts, but Jack didn’t bother with Japanese styles or Japanese formality. He was all about military martial arts that let you disable or kill someone as fast as possible, preferably before they had a chance to do it to you. But she’d also been taking some classes at the base, and they went in for all the stuff like sitting seiza and bowing to the sensei and counting push-ups or punches in Japanese.
Okay, she had liked that stuff a lot.
Sitting like that took a lot of the stress off her feet and ankles and lower legs. And it gave her more room to work on the bracers holding her forearms to the top of the cage. If the things were welded or crazyglued to the top of the cage, then she might have an answer. Crazyglue, in particular, was stupidly strong when you just pulled on it, but it was a lot weaker to shear forces.
She tried twisting her arms. She didn’t have a lot of room to work with, but all she needed to do was twist perpendicularly to the axis of her forearms. Hard. And back and forth. A lot.
She got started. One and two. Three and four. Back and forth, and back and forth. Nine and ten. Eleven and twelve …
* * *
Jack tried to look calm. Locke stared at him with apparent fascination. “You care that much about her?”
Jack glared at the old fart. “I tell you what. Give me a machete and a SAW, and we’ll see just how much I care.” He gritted his teeth. “Of course I care! I wouldn’t have married her if I didn’t!”
Locke stroked his chin like he missed having his little beard and getting to do one of the classic supervillain gestures. “It’s really fascinating, from a psychological and genetic point of view. I didn’t expect you to be this emotionally invested. In any of this.”
Jack snarked, “Well, maybe that’s because your brain is an Adolph Hitler clone.”
Locke just smiled. “Exactly. All of me is an Adolph Hitler clone. But my upbringing was drastically different, and it seems that ‘nurture’ is about as important as ‘nature’ if you get the reference. At the end of World War II, there were several Nazi scientists who thought that it should be possible to build a new Fuhrer just from cloning Hitler. When I was old enough that they contacted me, I found out they were making several critical mistakes, so I used a lot of their technology while evolving and improving on the techniques. I think Maggie’s sheer genius shows that one can really do amazing work with advancing humanity, given a fundamental understanding of the human genome. Just as with your physical capabilities and inductive talents.”
Jack forced himself not to wince. “So I take it I’m the alpha test version?”
Locke casually smiled. “No Jack, I’m the alpha test version. I and five other babies were created at the end of the war. I was just the only one intelligent enough to play along with the psychotics who thought they were going to get another front for their Fourth Reich. Once I learned how their biological processes worked, and where the money was kept, I got rid of them. And my ‘brothers’.”
But Jack had already figured this one out. “Not all your ‘brothers’. You kept one around, in some remote place, so you could ‘kill yourself’ someday if you needed to.”
Locke nodded like he was pleased with Jack’s conclusions. “Exactly. He lived the life of Riley in a small town in Canada until I needed his body. Marissa Weigler made all that quite necessary and unpleasant. Maggie didn’t want to shoot me, or even my twin. I hadn’t realized she was capable of that much sentimentality. So I had to do it for her.”
Jack ventured, “So … Maggie and I are the beta test version.”
Locke nodded. “You and Maggie, and four others. But the other four opted out of my program in one way or another. Gordon chose to focus on Wall Street, where he was an admittedly brilliant financier and venture capitalist until he went to prison for SEC violations. Richard went into medicine and medical research until he was accused of murdering his wife. He’s currently on the run as a wanted criminal. You should find him and help him with that. There is no way a man of his intelligence would have manufactured a stupid lie like that. A one-armed man? Obvious. Donna chose to apply her beauty and her intelligence and her determination into being the perfect wife for a mere pediatrician and mother of two and little else. And Frances chose to be nothing more than a socialite until she cleared a retired French jewel thief of some thefts he was being framed for, and she has chosen to become a simple French wife since then. Bah. They all could have become so much more! They could have become … you.”
Jack smirked. “What, a sarcastic guy dating a hot redhead?”
* * *
A hundred thirty-one and a hundred thirty-two. A hundred —
The weld on her right bracer cracked, and her arm came free. She wanted to cheer in excitement, except she was still locked by her left arm, and she was still trapped in a freaky S&M birdcage, and a serial killer was out there biding his time before he dropped in and started hacking her into bloody Willow-pieces.
She grabbed her left bracer with her right hand so she could apply even more torsion. A hundred thirty-three and a hundred thirty-four. A hundred thirty-five and a hundred thirty-six. Jeez, she was going to have some really annoying bruises at the edges of these cuffs. Jack would make some weird refs about it.
Assuming Jack was okay. Because if he wasn’t, she was going to do whatever it took to turn this entire base into a smoking hole in the ground.
A hundred thirty-seven and a hundred thirty-eight. A hundred thirty-nine and a hundred forty. She could feel some give. A hundred forty-one and a hundred forty-two.
One of the heavy wires of the birdcage popped.
A hundred forty-three and a hundred forty-four. A hundred forty-five and a hundred forty-six …
The bracer twisted more, back toward her elbow. She just had one more bit up near her wrist.
She froze at the sound of a key turning a large bolt. She hastily stuck her right arm back where it was supposed to be and tried to look like her arms were still moored to the top of the cage.
A door creaked open and then slammed closed.
She tried not to panic at the steady click-click-click moving toward her in the darkened part of the room. She couldn’t see past the brightness of the spotlights.
Whoever it was decided to stop on the other side of the spotlights. Willow held still and waited. She held her arms against the top of the cage, hoping the person didn’t notice that an escape was in progress.
A throaty woman’s voice smirked from the darkness. “Well, hello, salty goodness!”
Shit. Willow wondered if she really was cursed.