Chapter 2: Game plan
Trish was already waiting for him when he entered DMC.
"Do I get to play this time?" she asked with a pleading expression.
"Sure, as soon as we figured out the game."
Dante threw her the envelope.
"You're kidding, right? This is just a little girl." Trish complained when she saw the picture.
He took it out of her hand and looked at it.
The little girl was pretty in her own way. She made the impression of being sick, because of how pale she was. It was closer to the color of porcelain then human flesh, if the colors of the picture were realistic. Her hair looked black except for where the sun reflected of it, there it was a dark, deep burgundy. Not even her eyes seemed to have much color, but starred back at him in a slate gray, deep sorrow mirrored in them.
He turned it over. The stamp was smudged, but he could make out the year.
"This picture is 13 years old. She must be, what…., 20 now?" he guessed. At least he was rid of the worry that he would face a kid.
"A Necromancer? What could be so important about her?" Trish seemed amused. "They need you to take care of a Necromancer? This is funny, really."
"Well, maybe there is more to it."
A whole lot more, if Matier turned out to be right.
He was looking at the front of the picture again, trying to imagine how she would look now. Success eluded him, though, he just couldn't see it, but at least he was sure that he would recognize her when they ran into each other. A woman like that would stand out anywhere.
For a moment he mused over the expression the girl had on the picture. The sorrow and pain seemed so familiar. It must have been taken after a great loss. He only had felt that when his mother had died. Maybe she had lost someone shortly before this picture was taken, someone like her parents, or maybe a sibling?
"What does Matier write?" he asked Trish, caught in the spell of the girl's picture.
"Something about a ceremony on her 21st birthday and something about that talisman." She threw him the necklace.
"Sounds like you're going to need that."
He caught it out of the air, but after touching it even with gloves still on a strange tingle made him drop it.
"What the hell…?"
Trish looked up from the letter. "What?"
Dante knelt next to it, eying it suspiciously without touching it. The side that had landed up had demonic scripture engraved. It looked like a protection spell.
"You touched it, right? Why did it not zap you?"
Her shoulders shrug. "It is probably supposed to protect humans, not devils." She guessed.
Carefully he picked it up on the black leather band and let it tangle in front of his face. The other side had also an engraving, but he had never seen the signs before. The only thing he could identify was a dragon looking beast with a scythe. Regardless of what it was, it was master craftsmanship. Only rarely had he seen so much detail on an engraving of this size.
"Does she know what it protects against?"
"No, just a guess. She thinks that this enables the person wearing it to descend to the deathplains without dying."
She looked up, puzzled. "The deathplains? I thought hell was the underworld."
"Dead souls have to go somewhere and only a few are that evil." He mused.
"So we're talking limbo, or what?"
He had no idea, to be honest. Hell was all he had seen, and of that he figured it was only a small portion of the place. So why shouldn't there be a place like the deathplains.
"And how do I get there?"
Trish put the letter aside and scanned the news paper articles.
"I don't know, but it says here that her family owned a mansion outside of town."
"How convenient. I guess we should check it out."