Daisy studied the problem for ages without hitting on any good way to break the concealment ward. She was left with the dumbest method available.
Which was to sit and wait! Wait for whoever was inside to come open the door for them.
Thirty or forty of them sitting out here in the dead of night might not draw much notice. But come daybreak, once the nearby residents spotted them and realized something was off about the place, the old witch's days of seclusion would likely be over.
Sure enough, after she'd sat at the door for fifteen minutes, a ramshackle wooden hut finally revealed itself.
Crossbones's jaw dropped, his face the very picture of disbelief. The rest of HYDRA wore much the same expression, as if half their worldview had just shattered.
"I'm starting to believe this old bird really does have magic." Viper watched a derelict house materialize out of empty space. It didn't pop into being all at once—rather, like ripples spreading across water, the true scene surfaced layer by layer. For her, it was something of a novelty.
"The rest of you wait out here. We're going in." Daisy gave Viper a pat on the back to signal her forward. The contact reminded her that this woman had nothing covering her back—gorgeous bare back, slender waist. Honestly, it felt pretty nice.
Viper shot her a displeased glare.
Crossbones and Diamondback exchanged a look. Their two bosses got along well—that was a good thing.
The two of them watched as a small door opened in the wooden hut. Daisy and Viper stepped forward and vanished from everyone's sight.
January in Massachusetts was on the cold side, but stepping into the room, Daisy and Viper were met with a wave of damp. All kinds of herbs they couldn't name were heaped around the place, and the scene was wreathed in an acrid, stinging smoke, the whole view fogged over. If nothing else, the inhalable particulate matter in the air had to be off the charts.
The floor had no wooden boards—uneven, rough, like the skin of some creature. Viper couldn't make out much that was unusual, but the sharp-eyed Daisy caught countless bloodstains in the seams of the floor and walls, along with the hair of animals and humans alike.
A soft thump, thump echoed faintly all around, an irregular vibration recurring near the two of them. It was like someone beating an African hand drum—and a little like the sound of human heads dropping to the floor.
Daisy felt as though she'd gone in one step from a modern city of steel and concrete into a hell-themed version of the Harry Potter world.
"You sure you can handle a scene like this? I get the feeling my poisons won't do me much good here."
Viper could sip wine with elegance at a bloody murder scene, and she'd poisoned more people than Daisy had ever laid eyes on, so fear didn't really enter into it. She was simply planning for failure before success—the moment she walked in, she'd started plotting her exit.
"Relax, we can pull out anytime." The first thing Daisy had done on entering was test a teleport—there seemed to be no restriction on spatial displacement, so their escape route was reasonably secure.
She wanted to give Viper a reassuring pat, but one look at how this lady was dressed and she had no idea where to land it. The woman wore far too little. She could hardly pat her on the chest and say, Don't worry.
The room wasn't large, and the two of them weren't here for a tour. They walked straight into the main hall, where a woman in reading glasses and tattered pajamas was teasing a black cat.
She treated their arrival as if it were nothing—as if they didn't exist at all.
Daisy, who flattered herself that she'd read no shortage of idle books and knew this sort of scene reasonably well, spoke first. "Madame, my companion is in need of your wise guidance."
The old woman went on teasing the cat. Just as Daisy was beginning to think she was deaf and hadn't heard, and was preparing to say it again, the old woman finally spoke.
Her voice was impossibly ethereal, as though she were speaking from the clouds, her English accent stranger still. The two of them could barely make it out.
"You want guidance—then who's to guide me? An unavoidable calamity has walked up to my door on your heels. What am I supposed to do?" The old woman wore a sorrowful frown, as if she'd run into some great trouble.
Viper tugged at Daisy. In her understanding, anyone talking like this was usually about to throw down.
Daisy waved a hand, signaling that Viper was overreacting—it wasn't yet time for a strategic withdrawal.
"Then is there anything we can help with? We do hold some sway in the real world."
The old woman looked Daisy over with no expression, then glanced at Viper. "I don't want to die. Can you help me with that?"
Even Daisy's scalp prickled at those words. Bosses in video games loved saying exactly this, and the next beat in the script was usually them devouring the protagonist or some such…
Mercifully, the old woman had no such twisted streak. There was resignation in her eyes, and release. The way she looked at Daisy and Viper was like looking at a pair of soul-collectors.
"Find me a woman and a book, and I'll rid your companion of the trouble she's carrying." The old woman traced two images into the air, then gathered up the black cat and hobbled slowly into the inner room, clearly with no intention of wasting more words on them.
Daisy looked at the woman first—no particular reason, except that she disliked books and liked women.
This woman was truly beautiful. Golden hair drifted in the wind, and a pair of pale green eyes—as if she came with the effect of colored contacts built in—adorned an exquisite face. Her expression was a little flustered, brimming with unease, like a frail little rabbit, the kind that stoked a man's protective instincts at every turn.
Just as Daisy was puzzling over who the woman was, Viper cried out beside her, and Daisy hurried to look over.
"This is impossible. We can't do this!" Viper shouted toward the inner room, but the old crone paid her no attention at all.
Daisy turned to look at the book—thick as a dictionary, a great heavy tome, the script on its cover unlike anything she'd ever seen.
She turned to Viper, waiting for an explanation.
Viper hesitated again and again, but in the end gave up part of the truth. "That script is identical to the one in the contract I signed back then. I've kept my youthful looks and lived eighty years, all thanks to that old contract. That was a demon's power."
She paused, then went on. "I know this book. Thirty years ago, I went looking for it. It's in the hands of a mysterious guardian in the East—a guardian so powerful that we'd have no chance whatsoever of getting our hands on it."
Stringing the clues together, Daisy more or less worked out the book's origin. It was tied to Viper's contract, and it sat in the hands of someone exceptionally formidable in the East.
This had to be the Darkhold in the Ancient One's collection.
She raised her eyes to the tome once more. Even as a mere image, she could feel the malevolence coiled within it.
This was a book of black magic, woven from the malevolent spells that the god of black magic, Chthon, had left behind when he departed the Earth.
As an Elder God of the planet's primordial age, Chthon naturally hadn't the time to crank out six thousand words a day, updating for half a year to produce one big thick book. The incantation he'd left behind was likely no more than a handful of lines—something like a master outline. Later generations had drawn knowledge from it according to their own understanding and recorded their own insights on its pages.
Many had written in it, including Dormammu, who now ruled the Dark Dimension and had once pored over the book as a later student of its arts, jotting down his own thoughts within. Only after generation upon generation of additions did it become the great heavy tome it was today.