by Lexie Dunne
“And I bet it’ll be darling.”
“Okay,” I said, finally laughing. “Now you’re just pushing it. What’s next? ‘Dainty’?”
“I was going to go with . . .” He cocked his head as he gave the matter some thought.
“You’ve run out of options.”
“No, I—yes, I’ve got nothing beyond using ‘cute’ again, so I concede the field. Hopefully without you kicking my ass, as you’ve already done that once tonight.” When I started to sink into my chair, he shook his head. “I deserved it. I’ll wait until later to lick my wounds. Right now, I’ve got a dinner to serve.”
Right on cue, my stomach growled. I covered my face with my hand even as Guy laughed.
“Hey, Gail?” he said when we finally sat down to the dinner he’d cooked (on his couch, since he and Sam apparently did not have a table).
“Yeah?”
“If I promise to never try and split myself into separate identities again, will you go out with me? I mean, we probably won’t be able to date outside of Davenport because if people see you with a second tall guy with green eyes, they’ll figure out I’m Blaze, but . . . I don’t know, I like you.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, though his shy offer made me want to tap-dance. His face fell so quickly that I had to stifle my laugh. “I was kidding. Of course I’d love to go out with you. Though I hope you’re prepared to deal with Vicki’s telling us ‘I told you so.’ ”
He looked at me over his plate, his eyes seeming even brighter than usual in the dimness of the TV screen. “I can deal.”
“Good,” I said, and I think we both pretended we weren’t smiling through the incredibly good meal that followed.
Chapter Twenty
central city mall at 6:30 2nite, need to talk
THE TEXT FROM Naomi, the first solid communication I’d had from her in days, showed up on my phone ten minutes after Angélica let me out of training the next afternoon. At least the reporter had given me a four-hour window to somehow get to the mall. Given that I was in New York and not Chicago, though, I would need more than four hours unless I got help. Guy would be busy in Miami all day, as he needed to put in some face time as Blaze. Angélica would yell at me for having a cell phone, and Jeremy was as stuck at Davenport as I was, so that left only one option.
“Ah, my mentee!” Vicki said upon seeing me on her threshold. “Dropping by?”
“Bored and restless,” I lied. I’d debated whether or not I should just be up front about the fact that I needed to get to Chicago. But if Naomi was indeed working with Chelsea, Vicki might feel the need to warn Angélica. So I’d just scope things out. “Feel up to entertaining me, mentor?”
“As long as I don’t have to feed you.” She stepped to the side to let me in. “Mostly because I don’t have any food in here—I got hungry at three in the morning and went through, like, half the fridge. There’s maybe a bag of chips if you’re hungry, but watching you eat is exhausting.”
“Yeah, so’s actually eating everything I have to in order to survive,” I said.
Vicki gave me a sardonic look and flopped, loose-limbed, on one of her black leather chairs. She was barefoot and wearing jeans and a simple white tank top. But even such a simple outfit gave me an opportunity.
“Jeans,” I said, looking enviously at her while I folded one of my legs underneath me and sat on the couch. “I’d kill to have a pair of jeans right now, you have no idea. It feels like I’ve been wearing a school uniform for the past two weeks.
Vicki gave my outfit the critical eye. “I bet. Davenport uniforms are yawn-fests. You haven’t cleaned out your apartment yet?”
“I haven’t left Davenport at all. But even then, none of my clothes would fit. The day you pulled Chelsea off me, I was wearing my skinny jeans and my tightest belt.” And I’d constantly had to pull up the waistline.
“Sounds like what you need, girlfriend, is a shopping trip.”
And just like that, I had a way to get to Naomi.
“Actually,” Vicki said, eyeing my shirt with its Davenport Industries logo, “let’s raid my closet first. And then we’ll go.”
“I kind of want to go to the mall back near my place. I like one of the stores there.”
“Chicago’s fine with me.”
“But what about the ’porters?”
“Leave that to me.”
Vicki was nearly a foot taller than I was, so I borrowed a pair of shorts instead, but I could get away with one of her shirts, which showed off my minimal cleavage rather well (the one thing the isotope had stolen from me was an impressive bust line). “Normally, you’d go to Reception and get some money, since they haven’t issued you a credit card yet,” Vicki said, as we headed for the main part of the complex. “But what good is having an internationally recognized supermodel as a mentor if she can’t make it rain a little?”
“You’re the best,” I said, absolutely meaning it. “But can I pay you back when I have money?”
“If you want. Whatever works.” Vicki leaned over to press a button but quickly slapped her hand back over the door at the call of “Hold the elevator!” from the corridor.
Angélica rounded the corner and hopped aboard. It was the first time I’d seen her wearing anything but workout gear, or wearing makeup, and I immediately felt a stab of pure, annoying jealousy. Of course, she was a knockout. “Where are we going?” she asked, her voice pleasant.
I wanted to sink into the floor, but Vicki merely scoffed. “Girl needs new clothes. Honestly, it’s the next best thing to slavery, keeping her in such Davenport outfits.”
Angélica looked at me. “Didn’t think to check with me first?”
“Kind of was hoping to sneak out. Does this mean we can’t go?” I asked. Naomi was going to be annoyed if I stood her up.
“As it happens, I need a new pair of shoes myself.”
“You’re coming?” Vicki asked.
Angélica shrugged. “Girl trip. How could I resist?”
I eyed her. “How’d you know we were going shopping?”
“Girl, what can I say? You’re my life. I make it my business to know everything about you.”
“Stalker.”
She grinned. “Also, I need new shoes. So where are we going?”
“Girl wants to go to her old haunt, and I thought it would be fun. You know I adore finding a new mall. The ’porter should be able to take three of us in one trip, too.”
“Sounds good,” Angélica said.
We disembarked, heading down a long, carpeted hallway similar to the Annals. I wondered at these ’porters that Guy and Vicki had told me about. I’d seen a variety of powers before, but teleporting had always seemed like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. If villains were able to just hop from one place to another spontaneously, that changed the battlefield. What would stop one from simply plucking up a hero without the ability to fly, teleporting somewhere very high, and dropping the hero?
And what did it feel like to teleport?
Vicki pushed through an unmarked door. I expected some kind of futuristic room full of fancy equipment and retro lighting, but instead it was a reception area for an office. The receptionist behind the desk gave her an expectant look.
“Three for Chicago,” Vicki said.
The receptionist pushed a yellow binder across the desk. “Sign the log. Full names, please.”
One by one, we signed on the next line of the little spreadsheet, and I goggled that such a fantastical thing could be surrounded by the mundane. Once Angélica, who’d taken the pen last, had scrawled her signature, the receptionist cleared her throat. “Gregory is available in Room Two.”
Vicki led the way down a little hallway that smelled like coffee and printer ink. All of the doors were labeled like offices, with room numbers and names, so when Vicki pushed open the door to Room
Two, I expected a cramped little office with a motivational poster of a cat dangling off a tree branch. Instead, we found a slightly overweight man in his forties sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, playing solitaire with a deck of cards. He wore a short-sleeved button-up shirt and a tie.
“Gregory,” Vicki said, throwing her arms wide. “My man.”
He looked up at her and kind of smiled. “Ah, good, I was looking forward to Miami. Been wanting a smoothie.”
“Sorry, Chicago this time.”
“Deep-dish pizza instead, got it.” Gregory gave me a once-over. “First-timer?”
“We’re initiating her.”
“It’s not going to hurt, is it?” I asked, giving the empty office a wary look.
“Tingles a little.” Greg stacked the cards and pushed them into his pocket. “ ’Bout a split second, put together. Some people get headaches. You going to be one of those people?”
“I hope not.”
“It’ll be okay,” Angélica said.
I watched as Gregory pulled a piece of cord out of his pocket. The other two seemed to know what to do; Vicki immediately stepped to Gregory’s right, and Angélica nudged me forward. Greg wrapped the cord around all three of us and instructed us to hold on to one of his arms. Angélica did so by putting her arms on either side of me, which only served to make me nervous. “Ready?” Gregory said.
“Rea—” Vicki started to say before Gregory turned blue like an activated bug zapper, and my world exploded into noise.
It was like being battered straight to the skull with a jackhammer. Instinct had me clapping my hands over my ears and dropping as unrelenting, loud, sheer walls of noise pounded at me, a cacophony of torture. It drilled into my head, splitting it into two equal halves of sheer agony.
“Gail? Gail!” The voice, a low contralto, pushed around, pushed through the wall until I heard Angélica in my head, above the breathing, above the car engines, above the roaring. “Gail! Listen to my voice. It’s all in your head, got it? It’s all in your head.”
I curled up tighter, only partially aware that there were arms around me. My head hurt so much, so, so much—and something pinched my shoulder.
Instantly, it was like somebody turned the volume down. “Ow! Cut that out.”
Something pinched my other shoulder, and the noise faded away entirely. I opened my eyes to see Gregory, Vicki, and Angélica staring back at me. “What the hell just happened?” I asked.
“We just ’ported,” Vicki said.
I looked around. We were in the same room with the circle on the floor. “No we didn’t.”
The other three laughed, which I felt was a little unfair. “Apparently you’re one of the ones that have an adverse reaction. It’ll wear off within fifteen minutes,” Gregory said. “I’ll see you ladies when you get back.”
My head felt as though somebody had stuffed it full of cotton batting. “You’re all nuts. This is some kind of sadistic trick, isn’t it, to warn me about what happens when I don’t follow the rules?”
Angélica pulled on my shoulder, forcing me to climb to my feet. “C’mon,” she said, marching me out the door and back down the little hallway.
It wasn’t until we moved into the reception area and I got a look at the receptionist that I realized anything had changed. Instead of a kind grandmotherly type manning the desk, there was a gigantic black man who was hunting and pecking at the keyboard with two fingers. “Welcome to Chicago,” he said, and then squinted at my face. “First time?”
“It’s that obvious?” I asked.
He gave me a polite smile. “They always look a little dazed.”
THE NEW YORK City ’porting station was in Davenport Tower, which made sense, but I was surprised to find myself exiting the Willis Tower in Chicago. The instant I stepped outside, everything felt familiar. This, I thought with a happy inward sigh, was my stomping ground. This was where I belonged.
“Feels like home?” Angélica asked, reading my thoughts perfectly. “You were always picking up the air currents, the smells, the sounds, even the feel of this place without being aware of it. Now that your senses are heightened, you notice it more. Feels great, right?”
“Feels awesome.”
We caught the train across town to the Central City Mall, which I suspected Naomi had chosen because it was close to all kinds of public transit. Even the train, which I’d always thought stank of rotting humanity, seemed welcoming to me. “You really do love this town, don’t you?” Angélica asked, as a couple of people down the train sneaked furtive looks at Vicki.
“I started saving up to move here when I was fifteen,” I said. Granted, I’d run afoul of the supervillains almost right away when I’d finally moved here, but that didn’t diminish Chicago’s luster for me. “It’s the first place that felt like home.”
“Home,” she said, a sigh in her voice. For her, home was Rio, thousands of miles and an entire climate change away. I wondered again why she’d left. “Must be nice.”
“Aw, cheer up. Maybe I’ll buy you a hot dog,” I said, and the look of sheer disgust on her face made me laugh.
A COUPLE OF hours later, I wasn’t laughing. “All right,” I called through the curtain. “You can stop anytime.”
“I can’t. I really can’t,” Vicki said, and continued, as she had been for the past fifteen minutes, snickering. “The look on the woman’s face when you didn’t even know your own size! I mean, I haven’t seen anybody that surprised since I attacked Near Death Man while he was in the shower.”
Even though I wasn’t wearing a shirt, I whipped aside the curtain to my dressing room to gape at Vicki, who stood in front of the three-way mirror, twisting this way and that to check the cut of a blouse. “You took down Near Death Man? I thought that was War Hammer.”
We were on hour two of shopping, which meant that we’d moved on to the frivolities, as Vicki had called them. She had deemed hour one time for picking up necessities, which to me meant pretty much everything. To Vicki, however, necessities had meant heading to her namesake’s store.
“Lingerie, darling,” she’d said, while I’d insisted that I only needed the basics. “If the sexual sparks that fly whenever you and Guy are around are any indication, you need plenty of it. And right away. I mean, now that you know who he is, what’s to stop you two from going at it like rabbits?”
Though I’d thanked her not to mention animals in the same sentence as my sexual habits, she’d merely laughed and insisted that I get lingerie—and plenty of it—on top of the more practical underwear. And truth be told, she had a point. I hadn’t even so much as kissed Guy, and sex was off the table until I’d been cleared, but maybe it would be nice to think ahead.
We’d moved on to everything else. We had the dressing rooms to ourselves, as the mall was mostly empty. Angélica sat in the spare chair, legs pulled underneath her, while Vicki and I tried on clothes.
“I got the first takedown,” Vicki said, referring to Near Death Man. “War Hammer got the final one. The one that stuck, if you will. So he gets the cred. But I caught Near Death Man first, it should be known.”
“While he was in the shower?” I asked, crossing my arms. As Vicki and Angélica cared not a whit about modesty, I’d decided to ignore it as well. I wore only one of my new bras and a pair of jeans. They fit like a dream, which made me want to dance at the thought of having nice-fitting clothes that actually looked good. But I’d learned the hard way that dancing in the stores made the sales staff give you odd looks. As they were already looking at me strangely because I hadn’t known my size, I decided that maybe it wasn’t wise to push the matter.
“I was going to let him dry off and put on a towel.” Vicki twisted to look over her shoulder at me. “Honestly, I was, but he threw the soap at me. What else could I do? And just so you know, catching a naked, slippery
man is a lot harder than it looks.”
“Hasn’t stopped you before,” Angélica said.
Vicki very maturely stuck her tongue out at her and went back to checking out the blouse.
“Speaking of men,” Angélica said, pinning that gaze on me, “I happened to run into the younger Bookman this afternoon. He had a spring in his step.”
“I don’t see why. I didn’t sleep with him, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“And you’d best keep it that way until you’re cleared.” Angélica gave me the hairy eyeball.
“At least let me do the crime before you make me do the time, woman.”
“Do the time, or do the Guy?” Vicki asked.
“That was terrible, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“And yet,” Vicki said, spinning in place even faster. She seemed to be checking out the structural engineering of the top at this point. I figured that was probably a necessity, given that she’d been known to break the sound barrier. “So why was Mr. Bookman so happy, Angélica? He’s been rather grouchy the past few days.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” And they both turned expectant looks on me.
I hunched down and pulled on the next shirt to try it on. It, like the others, bagged around the bustline. “Maybe I agreed to go out with him last night. But you didn’t hear it from me.”
I’d never heard a supermodel squeal that loud.
“I mean, it kind of makes sense. We knew each other from work, we had that whole Blaze-and-Hostage-Girl thing, he’s really cute, and smart . . .”
“Sure,” Vicki said, drawing the word out as if she didn’t quite believe me. She crossed her arms over her chest and grinned, wide and sarcastic. “And the fact that both of you are superheroes and incredibly hot for each other had nothing to do with it, right?”
I sighed and whipped the curtain between us closed.
Chapter Twenty-One
“OOH. NOW THESE, these are nice!”
Angélica hadn’t been bluffing, I discovered when she finally dragged Vicki and me away from the clothing and into the shoe department. If anything, she’d been playing her interests down. Angélica Rocha didn’t merely need a new pair of shoes.