Cyrus Kriticos is the main antagonist in Thirteen Ghosts.
Biography[]
Cyrus had a nephew named Arthur who married a woman named Jean and had two kids, Bobby and Kathy. Cyrus was not being very popular with the family since he, apparently, squandered the Kriticos family fortune. He wasn't too close with his nephew and had only seen him seldomly as a child. At an unknown point, Cyrus and his secret lover, Kalina Oretzia, discovered The Arcanum and Cyrus created Basileus's Machine in the form of a mansion from the blueprints in the Arcanum. With a team, which included Cyrus's psychic assistant Dennis Rafkin, Cyrus captured twelve earth-bound souls (among them Arthur's wife Jean) and had them moved to the basement of the house to become twelve of the thirteen ghosts in The Black Zodiac. Cyrus also had an estate lawyer named Ben Moss.
During the capture of the twelfth ghost (Horace "The Juggernaut" Mahoney), in the ensuing chaos, Cyrus and Kalina kill Kalina's fellow spirit liberator and fiance, Damon, for the tape-recorded Latin chant (needed to force the captive ghosts to use their life force to power up the machine) and faked Cyrus's death via decapitation.
Cyrus pretends that his nephew, Arthur and his family have inherited his supposed mansion, so that Arthur will be forced to become the thirteenth ghost for his children's lives. While Kalina protects Arthur from the rampant ghosts (as the machine requires a ghost who commits suicide out of an act of pure love to represent The Broken Heart), Cyrus abducts Bobby and Kathy and forces Arthur to become The Broken Heart for their lives.
Cyrus arrives at the machine's core, and orders Kalina to put Bobby and Kathy in jeopardy in order to force Arthur to become The Broken Heart, before playing Damon's tape-recorded spells throughout the house, which caused the twelve rampant ghosts to go to the core and power up the machine. He then betrays Kalina by activating a mechanism in cold blood which crushes Kalina between two glass walls (because she balked at his orders to put Bobby and Kathy in jeopardy), saying that greatness requires sacrifice.
Death[]
Cyrus getting sliced into pieces
When Arthur arrives at the core and notices from the twelve ghosts that Cyrus is actually alive and is not a ghost, the two have a vicious confrontation which ends when the Kriticos nanny, Maggie Bess, frees the ghosts from their trance. The furious ghosts then grab Cyrus and throw him into the core of the machine, slicing him to pieces.
Killed Victims[]
- Damon - Murdered
- Kalina Oretzia - Crushed to death by glass walls