Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games

by Marion G. Harmon

  I wasn’t exactly needed; Artemis and Seven, who must have entered after I “left,” were securing the street-villains that had been their targets. Svyatogor and Grendel shackled the Zmeys where they’d laid them all out a good thirty feet apart. We wouldn’t move them until we had separate wagons for them—Svyatogor’s briefing on the Russian mobster had included the important point that, once separated, his “heads” couldn’t rejoin without physical contact and each head was individually much less destructive.

  “Hah!” Svyatogor’s laugh boomed out. “The little ghost-girl is right! Thank you for allowing a fight of heroes.”

  Shell jumped. “You can see me?” she squeaked, wide-eyed.

  “Of course! My wise Babashka has touched my eyes with rusalka tears and I can see all spirits.”

  Her mouth formed an oh. I just laughed: magic—it wasn’t the first time.

  Grendel looked over at the happy Russian giant, shook his head. New skin was already replacing the blackened and charred layer of ablative hide he’d formed before attacking, and Rush had brought him some new pants along with the shackles and the somnolence cap needed to keep his Zmey unconscious.

  Lei Zi just laughed, a rare show of amusement at the part of the conversation she could hear. “I’m glad we could provide you some entertainment, Svyatogor. These will hold?”

  “Dah!” He patted his own Zmey in friendly fashion. “And this time we will keep him separate! As far separate as the soil of Mother Russia allows! Perhaps we will put one in orbit.”

  “Good, because our rides are here.”

  Chapter Two

  International cooperation is very important; after all, supervillains don’t care about borders and are perfectly happy to go where the money is. Smart countries observe extradition treaties and aren’t twitchy about allowing foreign capes to visit in pursuit of villains from their own rogues galleries. Of course it’s smart to team them with someone local, someone who knows the territory and the local police.

  Astra, Svyatogor-Sentinels Teamup Interview

  * * *

  Returning to the Dome meant a trip to the infirmary so Doctor Beth could wrap up my Zmey-burned leg and check me over. Blondie’s kick had almost certainly given me a concussion (it wouldn’t be the first time), but my superhuman toughness meant it was already healing up; the blurry halo effect had gone away, leaving only a pulsing but not please-kill-me headache, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Doctor Beth told me not to hit anything with my head for a while and let me go. Collecting my lollypop, I went upstairs to Blackstone’s office.

  He looked up at my knock on his open door. “Come in, my dear. Have you been to see—ah, I see you have.” I removed the lollypop from my mouth and dropped it in his wastebasket before sitting down. Orange was not my favorite flavor.

  “Very good work, tonight.” Of course he had watched from Dispatch. “And your ‘public appearance’ there at the end didn’t hurt us. Shots of your little street-fight are already circulating online and being used to frame the news stories…” His smile faded as he studied me. “And you aren’t happy about it. May I ask why?”

  “I saw the tree.” I had to keep myself from sinking down in my seat like a guilty child.

  It took him a second to understand, but there was only one tree I’d ever talked about. He touched his epad and his office door closed behind me.

  “Kitsune is back in your dreams?” he asked carefully.

  “No—no. I’d have said something if he was. But I’ve been dreaming of the cherry tree. More and more often, almost every night now.”

  “And this wasn’t cause for concern?”

  “He’s never been back.” It had been months, but I hadn’t seen so much as a sneaky white fox’s tail since our defense of Littleton. “I just go to the tree. It all feels as real as it ever did, but no Kitsune. And— It’s even kind of nice. Restful. I don’t have any nightmares, the nights I go to the tree. But I’m more awake there every time. And I stay longer.”

  Blackstone sat back, stroking his goatee. “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

  “Shell and Shelly know, of course. I’ve had Chakra check me out to see if somebody is screwing with my head, but nope.” Chakra was also pretty sure I wasn’t wandering outside my own head at night—apparently Out Of Body experiences left distinct traces on one’s chakras. “And I went to Ozma last week.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Tuesday. We had tea in her lab, and she tested me.”

  “How?”

  “Thoroughly.”

  Blackstone chuckled. It had been a little surreal; Ozma had put on her green lab coat, looked at me through gold-rimmed glasses with multiple swing-down attachments, hit me with an array of tuning forks, made me close my eyes and randomly pick up assorted objects, and finally said…

  “She couldn’t find anything wrong either. But she admitted that her magic is fairy magic—that it’s mostly concerned with forms and appearances.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That something magical might really be going on in my head, but that she’s more like a supernatural brain surgeon and I might need a supernatural psychiatrist. She says that my problem might be metaspiritual instead of metaphysical.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.” I rubbed my face, forgetting to feel guilty. I really had no idea what it meant; magic gave me a headache and there were so many kinds of it. There was Jacky’s grandmother’s voodoo (which might or might not be a breakthrough), Chakra’s tantric magic that bordered on psychic power, Ozma’s Oz Magic, the old magic of Svyatogor’s Baba Yaga. Each magic “tradition” with its own rules, each equally valid, like alternate laws of physics.

  Blackstone thumped a finger on his chin, considered what I’d told him. Part of me wanted to leave it at that. The cowardly part. But…

  “I’m not here about the dreams. When I almost got knocked out tonight—sir, I saw the tree. I was back there.” And it had been real, in all its coherent clarity and opposite-of-dreamlike reality. “I’d have stayed if Shell hadn’t virtually slapped me silly.”

  “I see.” For just a moment, he looked sad. “And why didn’t you come to me with this before, Hope? I had thought … Well.” He waved it away, but I felt awful.

  “I haven’t even told my parents.”

  “Why not?”

  I was twenty years old, I was Astra, and I wasn’t going to cry. I kept my back straight, looked at the show-posters behind his desk. “It’s like… It’s like the doctors again. When I was young.”

  I wasn’t phobic about doctors and hospitals anymore; repeat-exposure to Doctor Beth—not to mention my own hospital trips since becoming Astra—had seen to the wearing away of that fear. But for years, doctors and hospitals had been all about chemotherapy or tests, bloodwork to see if my childhood cancer would come back. Those had been years when I’d felt like my own body was a time bomb, ready to start ticking again at any moment, and my parents had walked around trying to act normal and not scared to death for my sake.

  A few weeks into my training as Astra, I’d realized that my breakthrough had forever removed that particular fear; I couldn’t even catch a cold anymore, and while I was far more likely to die hard somewhere than I’d been before my breakthrough, I was safe from the big C. I’d laughed and cried hysterically.

  And now I had another time bomb inside me, inside my head. Blackstone blinked at the apparent non-sequitur, and then his eyes widened.

  “I see. I do see. Hope…”

  I shook my head. “I know it’s not the same. Not really.”

  And it wasn’t. So maybe Kitsune had opened a connection that had stayed open, a connection to Somewhere-Not-A-Dream, and it was growing stronger—it wasn’t going to kill me. But I didn’t know why I was going back to the nicest place I’d ever hung out in between sunset and sunrise. I didn’t know what was happening and it was magic. It was unknown and therefore dangerous, and I had no control over i
t.

  “We will fix this, Hope,” Blackstone said, pulling me from my spinning thoughts. Seeing the bright compassion in his eyes, I swallowed as my throat closed.

  “Really?” My voice sounded small even to me, barely a breath, and I flushed. Blackstone’s mouth tightened.

  “Yes. The DSA and national and international intelligence agencies are already looking for Kitsune.” His brow furrowed, but he made no comment on how hard it could be to find a shapeshifter. “And I have contacts in the State Department who can lean on the Japanese government. Since he’s their problem originally, they may have incentive to help us. We’ll find him, he’ll cooperate, and we’ll fix this.

  “Meanwhile, and I hope you take this as I mean it, for now you’re benched.”

  “I know.” If I could suddenly go wandering back to the tree from a hard enough hit, what was next and when would it happen? In the middle of a fight again, when lives depended on me? “That’s why I came to see you.”

  “Good. We’ll announce it as a purely medical benching, to be lifted when you’re ‘medically safe.’ After all,” he chuckled, making me smile. “You did get a boot to the head tonight. It’s on video.”

  I needed that smile; it gave me the courage for what I said next.

  “Since I’m benched, may I take a day? A whole day? I’d like to go see Doctor Cornelius.”

  * * *

  “And that’s something you don’t see every day.”

  Detective Fisher had joined the after-party, since that was what the after-action briefing had turned into. The scruffy CPD detective had come with Captain Verres to report on the Superhuman Crimes Department and CPD Superpower Response Unit parts of the operation, and now he watched the proceedings with a Willis-supplied drink in his hand.

  “Yup,” Captain Verres agreed. Svyatogor made even big bad Captain Verres look small, and the Russian giant’s kick-stamps shook the reinforced floor as he crossed the cleared center of the team lounge twirling his huge iron club.

  I couldn’t tell if the captain was impressed or laughing at us, and didn’t care either way. Maybe it was a Catholic thing, but even if nothing was solved, even knowing I was going to consult Doctor Cornelius, I felt a hundred pounds lighter for confessing to Blackstone.

  Verres wasn’t laughing. “I wonder if we could make it part of our hand-to-hand training. What is it?”

  “Combat Hopak,” Shell said. Because of our guests, she’d attended the meeting in her sleek chrome-girl Galatea shell. “Built on an ethnic Cossack dance.”

  The Powers That Be had deemed the whole operation an outstanding success. The two-ring containment approach had kept the high intensity takedown of the Bratva cell from spilling out into the streets—with my notable exception—and we’d even kept the damage away from the occupied half of the building. Svyatogor, our on-loan Russian police cape and Bratva expert, had declared a celebration.

  And Svyatogor didn’t have the floor to himself; Grendel kick-stamped right behind him, dreadlocks flying, drawing on his mastery of the ancient art of hip-hop to match Svyatogor’s moves in spirit if not in execution. Half of the room clapped in time, not that the two of them could hear us over the boom of their stamping feet.

  There were days when I just purely loved wearing the cape.

  “You’re recording this, right?” I leaned back to whisper to Shell. The black-haired and mustached giant should have looked ridiculous laughing and prancing in his baggy trousers, but he didn’t; egging each other on, he and Brian looked like two war-gods celebrating. Or a god and a monster anyway, maybe Gilgamesh and Enkidu (and my old lessons from Ajax were showing).

  “Duh.” Shell laughed. “We are going to get so many site hits on this. Quin would absolutely kill me if I didn’t post it.”

  The swirling music ended with general applause and they took their bows before surrendering the floor to Quin. Svyatogor dropped into a chair beside us (reinforced, we were used to big company), and Brian wandered off to exchange commentary with Crash and Tsuris while Ozma listened benevolently.

  It had been Lei Zi’s decision not to involve the rest of the Young Sentinels in the operation—Crash and Megaton weren’t old enough for police ops yet, anyway—but she’d insisted we all sit for the briefing; tactics training for the future. We were all in “uniform,” of course; who knew how much of the party footage Quin would want to use?

  Speaking of Quin… “Wow!” was Shell’s assessment of The Harlequin’s moves as she called for her own music and showed what a former Cirque du Soleil acrobat could do. Her high-bouncing acrobatic dance routine was anything but improvised and Svyatogor’s cheering drowned out further comments.

  With all eyes in the room on Quin, Rush appeared in the empty chair at my other side and leaned in to be heard. “And how are you doing, kid? I saw that kick in slow-mo.”

  I shifted and winced. It must have looked spectacular from his hypertime-accelerated perspective.

  “The headache’s gone, but I won’t be dancing.”

  Truthfully, it was the leg that still bothered me. Doctor Beth had cheerfully informed me that a normal person on the receiving end of Zmey’s touch would have been looking at a charred stump of a leg. I just had what felt like the world’s worst sun burn and an ache that went to the bone.

  “And that is a shame!” Svyatogor clapped my shoulder. “Dancing is good for the spirit, a celebration of life! We live!”

  And that made me wince again; not all of us were alive—two of the Russians Artemis had dropped in the action’s opening had died when the Zmey fighting Grendel had stood practically right on top of them. They’d basically cooked in that steaming hell before Seven could get to them.

  The big hand on my shoulder tightened.

  “Do not be tender hearted, devochka moya. No innocents were hurt today, and no man we found in that place deserved your pity.”

  “What he said,” Shell seconded inside my head as Rush nodded agreement. “I read their files.”

  I sighed. Bright side, we’d stopped the Bratva from moving into Chicago. The fight had been the culmination of months of international cooperation, and the Russian mob’s attempt to move in on the Chicago Mob was yet one more of the follow-on effects of our takedown of Villains Inc. They’d brought their own drug suppliers, taste for violent extortion, and sex-trafficking.

  I tried on a smile. “At least now you don’t have to fight them back home, right?”

  That earned me another booming laugh. He patted my shoulder one more time, reached for his beer.

  “My dear, you are the ne plus ultra, the very epitome, of women! You are strong, enduring, with a heart full of the love of others. You should have been a Russian! But you are an American, which means that even with all of your experience, you are a little blind.”

  I blinked. It was the first time I’d ever been called that. His big dark eyes suddenly looked a lot more serious.

  “You see good and evil as forces that can always be divided up into sides. For good to triumph, all it must do is identify evil and fight to win. If only it were so simple!” He wagged his thick finger, no longer smiling.

  “I quote the great Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’”

  He looked at his finger, spread his huge hands and dropped them.

  “It loses something in translation, but Solzhenitsyn did not mean that there are not evil people doing evil things. Only that we will never be rid of them all. Often they will be unrecognizable, and sometimes they will be us.”