Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  “Okay,” he said. He had a long stride for such a short man. His tanned body glistened with sweat. “That’s not everything, but it’s enough for now.” He glanced sideways on her, a smirk on his lips. “The cards are on the table.” A jet roared by overhead as they rounded a bend in the sidewalk, turning into the entrance for the Lady Danger River Commons. Long and narrow, its edges shaded by moss-covered cypress trees, its shallow hills punctuated by banana trees and thriving with fragrant jasmine bushes and crepe myrtles, the park had recently taken on a sour reputation for a series of rapes that had occurred there late at night. The park’s name, of course, had inspired lurid headlines and even a few cracks from late show comedians. Although the rapist had been caught, the Lady Danger River Commons was less popular than it once had been, and city officials were pushing to change the name to something more neutral, as though the name itself were responsible for the crime.

  Samuel and Kate slowed as they jogged through the park, its beauty striking to them, their voices lowered. “When your dad died,” Samuel said, “it tore my heart open. I questioned myself. I questioned what we do. I questioned the world. I practically wore sackcloth for months.”

  They passed a trio of kids throwing a frisbee, and when the disk went wild and headed past them, Samuel pitched his body forward like an outfielder, snagging the edge of the toy, rolling into a somersault, spinning his body, and throwing the frisbee back to the kids in an easy, graceful flight. It was an Olympic-class maneuver, and the kids stared at him open-mouthed and then began to clap. He waved back at them briskly, taking a jaunty bow and resuming the jog. When he spoke again, it was as though nothing had just happened.

  “I was depressed,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep. I cried at odd hours. It was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me.” He glanced at her.

  She nodded at him to continue, out of breath from the jogging and not willing to interrupt.

  “It wasn’t just your dad,” he clarified. He glanced at her again. “I mean, he was a great guy and a good friend and I still miss him. But it was the reality of him dying. We weren’t playing dress-up. We weren’t just some club. I mean, he died, and that was it. I came to his funeral and I sat with you and you were so alone, and I thought to myself, who is going to get this little girl dressed for the prom? Who’s going to make sure her date treats her right? Who’s going to move her to college?”

  “You did,” she said.

  He shrugged it off, ducking under a branch covered with pink crepe myrtle blossoms that had grown out into the path. “So the reality was there, and I couldn’t get the image—I’m sorry to dwell on this, but you need to hear it—I couldn’t get the image of him dying out of my head.”

  She winced. “Uncle Samuel, I’m not sure I want—”

  His voice, usually mild, turned steely. “That doesn’t much matter,” he said. He increased their pace. They passed an elderly woman throwing bread to pigeons. The birds swarmed around her like a cloud. “This is the rest of it, the part we didn’t mention before in your checklist of secrets.” His voice went staccato. “A few nights ago you took your father’s armor and emptied his secret lab. You left a note there for your mother telling her not to worry, as though that were possible. You intend to become the new Doctor Camelot and to hunt down the people who killed your father and who killed the Storm Raiders. Everyone but me.”

  She was struggling to keep up with him.

  His feet beating rhythmically against the pavement, he stared at her. “That about sum it up?”

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said. She hadn’t spoken her intentions out loud to anyone before. It felt good to do so, a relief. But a burden, too. A commitment. She nearly tripped on a crack in the asphalt, then righted herself.

  “Then you need to listen to this, the details and all. This isn’t something entered lightly.” He wiped his arm against his forehead, slowing to a more normal pace, but still pressing on. “We were trying to stop the Cirque d’Obscurité from tearing down the Roscoe Clay Bridge.” He shook his head. “They’d been hired to do it by Deadlock. You’ve heard of him, right? A master planner. He always planned things so that he could accomplish at least three goals at once. That time, it was—” He ticked the items off on his fingers as he ran. “Destroying the bridge so that the construction company he was invested in would get the rebuilding contract. Killing a federal judge who always crossed that bridge at the same time of morning—the judge was about to make a ruling that would have damaged Deadlock’s stock portfolio. And creating a distraction, keeping us busy so that his other hired goons could break into a bank vault across town.”

  He shook his head again, picking up the pace slightly. “We were tipped to it. I don’t remember how, exactly. Something about the judge.” He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, Deadlock had been gathering intel on the judge from people at the court, and one of them realized that the judge was in danger. Your dad figured out that Deadlock had hired some mercenaries, and pinpointed the Cirque d’Obscurité. He even figured out where and when based on the judge’s usual schedule. So we were there at the bridge when the Cirque d’Obscurité attacked.”

  His voice pitched an octave lower. Throughout the conversation, he’d been turning to her every few seconds. But now he stared at the ground, at the path ahead, at anything but Kate. “We didn’t know much of anything about the Cirque d’Obscurité then, and we underestimated them badly. We were holding them off pretty well. Raiden kept them dancing with his bolts of lightning. Miss Chance helped make sure that a cement truck dumped about a ton of wet concrete on Hector Hell. Velociraptor managed to pin down Kraken. I was tangling with the Werewolf, trying to grab his neck, trying to keep him from biting me in half.” He stopped talking for a moment as they passed a pair of joggers heading in the opposite direction. “And then Hector Hell got off a stray shot at the bridge. His fire tore right through one of the support struts. There was an awful sound of metal rending and the road across the bridge starting to tear up.” Samuel’s eyes stayed forward. “Your dad flew in there, into the mess of slag and crumbling rock that Hector Hell had made, and he started to hold everything together.”

  Kate was panting now from the exertion, from the story, struggling to keep up with him. It had been a long time since she’d run like this.

  Sensing her dropping back, Samuel eased the pace a bit, but didn’t stop running. “That armor made your father so strong,” he said. “He could lift more than a ton. He got himself into the hole where the strut had been. He held everything together with one arm, using one of the tools in his armor to start to make some repairs, to patch up the hole enough that the bridge would keep standing.” Samuel’s own breath was getting ragged. “I could see him standing there working on the hole, his armor catching the sunlight, when the Behemoth walked up.”

  She felt tears in her eyes, saw them in his. “Uncle Samuel—” she started.

  “Let me finish,” he said. His voice was a low whisper, almost lost in his panting from the run, but she heard it. “He’d want you to hear this. He’d want you to hear this before you did what you’re thinking of doing.” He finally turned to her again, slowing his pace a little more. They entered the shadow of a row of oak trees. “He’d want you to hear.”

  She nodded.

  He turned back to the path in front of them and slowed to a walk. “The Behemoth in pictures is impressive enough, but that’s nothing like seeing him up close. He’s about ten feet tall. Literally. Muscles on top of muscles like a huge bodybuilder. Covered with these horrific tattoos. He smells terrible, too. Like the cat house at a cheap zoo where they don’t clean often enough. He smells of spoilage and death. His claws—when I’m shrunk down, those claws are as big as I am.”

  He shook his head. “The thing you have to know, Kate, is that your father saw the Behemoth coming. He could tell that the Behemoth was going to attack him, and he knew perfectly well how strong that man is. Just minutes before, we both saw him throw an empty school bus nearly
half a mile, and he wasn’t trying very hard. But your dad stayed put. I still don’t know why. Maybe he hadn’t quite finished fixing the strut yet. Maybe he thought his armor was stronger than it was. But he stayed there, finishing his soldering and gluing and whatever else he was doing. He stayed there and didn’t flinch when the Behemoth reached out and grabbed his head in one hand.”

  Walking beside him, Kate started to cry. The scent of jasmine was fading and she was picking up the edge of something rotten in the air, something foul. She wiped an eye on her shoulder and resolutely turned her attention back to Samuel.

  Samuel shrugged. “That was it, more or less. The Behemoth twisted his hand, and some joint in your father’s armor broke and his neck snapped. We were all so shocked that they got away. We tried to track them down, but they went on the run, eventually leaving the country.” He finally pointed to a bench and walked toward it. Instead of sitting, he began to do his stretches again, working the muscles, keeping them from cramping. He gestured for her to do the same and she did. “I nearly quit, you know,” he said. “All of us did. And I was depressed for months. But then Vikki finally snapped me out of it.”

  Vikki was Victoria Moon, one of Kate’s “aunts.” She had been the superhero Miss Chance, who was supposed to be able to manipulate probabilities—luck—to her advantage.

  Samuel bent far forward, massaging a calf. “The two of us were trying to capture Lionman and I had my head up my ass. I was thinking about retiring, about your dad, about how damn stupid it was for me to shrink myself down to six inches tall like a walking, talking Ken doll. So she finally turned to me and said, ‘If I kick the bucket tonight, you’ve got to promise not to mope so damn much. I won’t be responsible for you sucking that much sunshine out of the world.’ And then we talked about it. She cried, I cried, and Lionman nearly got away, but then we stopped him and found out that he was planning to kill an ex-girlfriend of his—he’d been stalking her for weeks in between pulling of string of bank heists. If we’d let him get away, he probably would have killed the woman. But we caught him. He went to jail because of us. And it was better after that.”

  He finally sat on the bench. The bench was deep and high and his feet almost didn’t make it to the ground. “All of us knew, Katie, that we could die. Every day. It’s a part of what we do—of what we did. You think we went up against the blind? All of us—all of us—updated our wills. We were quiet on that flight down. That’s part of why Winged Tornado rode in that damn plane with us—he could fly as fast as a plane, you know. Faster, really. We knew that one of us might die down here and we wanted to be together.” He sighed. “We didn’t figure it would go as badly as it did, but we knew that it might happen.”

  Kate placed a hand on his back and he leaned back into it. He patted her gently on the knee, then turned to look at her. “I promised Vikki all that time ago that I wouldn’t mope if she died. I’ve broken that promise a bit, though I don’t think she’d hold it against me, under the circumstances. But I’m not going to let the rest of my life be darkened by what happened.” He smiled faintly. “And besides, that was it, you know. That day was my last time in the silly, tiny suit.”

  She opened her mouth to say something in reply, some protest, but he shook his head.

  “I knew when you knew, you know.” He smiled at the twisted words. “You were careful in your father’s workshop, but your mother could tell you’d been down there. And she called me. She wasn’t sure what to do about it. I told her you were old enough, that you had to decide for yourself what to do with the knowledge, that you’d work through it. She was terrified that you’d put on the armor yourself, that you’d try to do something stupid. She wanted me to swear that, if you ever did that, I’d talk you out of it.” He paused. “I didn’t swear. I knew that the time might come when you wanted to do this, and that it wasn’t in my nature to make you stop. So I’m not going to tell you not to do it.” He pointed at her. “But start smaller. Practice. Work with me.” He gestured at her. “One little run, and you’re exhausted. How are you going to make out if you get into a prolonged fight?”

  She shook her head. “The armor’s motors make movement nearly effortless—”

  He cut her off. “Yeah, and what happens if the armor cuts out? It happened to your dad once or twice. You’re left carrying 150 pounds on your back.”

  “It’s more like sixty-five now.”

  He nodded. “All right, then. Next workout, you jog wearing sixty-five pounds on your back.”

  She looked at him and smiled. “I don’t suppose you’d care to take a taxi back to our cars?”

  He shook his head, a faint grin on his lips. “Nope,” he said. The haze was breaking away overhead and the hot sunlight suddenly flooded the bench. He stood. “We’ll keep a better pace on the way back,” he said. “I won’t take it so easy on you.”

  And she rose and began to jog after him.

  I’ve studied sleep patterns in Chicago, London, Vanguard City, Miami, even as close by as New Orleans. Inevitably, patients in Devil’s Cape spend as much as twenty-five percent more of their sleep in a state of fitful dreaming. Inside or outside of Holingbroke. It can’t just be a matter of the heat. There are other patterns at play here, patterns I’m as yet unable to discern.

  — Excerpted from the journal of Dr. Dennis Marchant, Holingbroke Psychological Institute, 1957

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  2 a.m.

  At first, Jason’s dream seemed almost pathetically obvious. Literal. He’d fallen asleep reading about the Argonauts, and in his dream, he found himself dressed in a white tunic, surrounded by faceless, muscular men, working a huge oar made from an olive tree, its surface rubbed down with sandalwood oil. The salt air filled his nostrils and the Aegean Sea was a rich blue that reflected the sunlight.

  And then the woman walked down the length of the Argo toward him. She was beautiful. Her blonde hair was tied neatly behind her in a ponytail. Her skin was flawless. Her simple tunic clung to her.

  And her eyes seemed filled with blood.

  “So you’re the man of the hour, huh?” she said. Her voice had a slight Southern twang to it, and she spoke English, not Greek. She glanced around at the rows of men, her red eyes apparently taking them in without difficulty. “I tell you, this wasn’t the dream I planned on being part of. Nor are you the dreamer.” She shrugged, her pale shoulders rising and falling, a scattering of freckles catching the sunlight. “But the one I was seeking is filled with doubts and disbelief. He’s closed to me now. And yet you—you’re so very open that it’s like you were shining a light for me.” She peered closer at him, touched his forearm as he worked the oar. “Now why is that?”

  His muscles ached from the labor of working the oar. As his eyes moved out to the sea, he could tell by the movement of the foam and the spray and the seagulls in the distance that they were moving very, very fast.

  “Ho!” shouted a voice to his right. Turning, he saw one of the other men at the oars come into focus. He was brown-haired, bearded, and almost impossibly muscular. His bronzed skin glistened in the sunlight. He was wrapped in a tattered lion’s pelt, its huge head open in a roar. Heracles. “At last!” the man snorted in Greek. “Someone who can match my power. I’ve been babying poor Theseus here along.” He gestured at another man, thinner and spare, whose curly black locks ran to his shoulders. Theseus’s eyes, framed by long, delicate eyelashes, were a piercing slate gray that didn’t reflect the light. They looked calculating and haunted. He nodded at Jason. “Ho, Argonaut,” he said in a voice rough with salty air.

  Jason nodded back at the two men. He looked back at the woman. A few hairs had strayed from her ponytail and they danced in the wind. He wondered how she could see with those eyes. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t seem particularly surprised,” she said, gently nudging a faceless Argonaut aside and sitting bes
ide Jason on the bench, “to be in a dream like this.”

  Jason watched as two men near the front of the Argo dropped their oars. They stood in unison, blond and handsome. The backs of their tunics were suddenly pushed open and huge, white, feathered wings sprang out, spreading against the wind. They launched themselves into the air, laughing, waving at their crewmates below. They flew effortlessly with their wings, steering themselves toward the sun in some elaborate game of tag. Calais and Zetes—the Boreads—sons of Boreas, Greek god of the north wind. Jason lifted an arm from his oar for a moment and waved at them, then quickly returned to the grueling work before Heracles’ strength, unbalanced by Jason’s, could steer them off course. It was very important, for some reason, to remain on course. “I’ve had dreams this vivid before,” he said. He thought of a dream he’d had as a child, a dream of flying. And the following day, he’d learned how to take flight and had taught Julian what he’d learned. He thought, too, of the more recent dream, the one with the beach and the vestments. “I’ve learned not to fear them,” he said.

  A gaunt man rowing in front of them released his oar and turned around. His black hair was thin and streaked with gray. “Fear them,” he said in Greek, his voice shaking. His eyes were the green of olives, his skin paler than the other Argonauts, the circles under the eyes dark with fatigue or worry or illness. “You should always fear your dreams,” the man whispered.

  “Idmon?” Jason asked. Idmon the seer. He had visions. He’d known that he would die if he joined the Argonauts, yet he’d done so anyway. He’d died in Bithnyia and the city of Heraclea was built over his bones.

  Idmon nodded slowly. “And you are the other Jason,” he said. His eyes moved languidly to the mysterious woman beside Jason and then he nodded again, in respect or sympathy.