"Why didn't you tell me you had the hots for Atlas? Sure I wanted him, but I'd have settled for Burnout."
I sighed. "You came back to haunt me just to tell me that?"
She swung her feet and hunched forward over her hands, resting her chin on her shoulder to look down at me.
"No silly, I came around to tell you everything's going to be alright. So have a little faith."
* * *
I opened my eyes.
The ward was quiet, even to my super hearing. A dimmed lamp lit the room and machines beeped quietly to themselves. Nobody sat at the foot of my bed.
Chapter Forty One
And on our developing story, fresh details are emerging regarding the terrorist attack on the President at Whittier Base. Tragically, Atlas, Ajax, and Nimbus are confirmed dead, while Astra remains in critical condition. Every night since the attack, mourners and well-wishers have been gathering for candlelight vigils outside the Dome, and impromptu memorials of flowers, lights, placards, and other offerings have been left at its doors. So far there have been thirty-eight confirmed superhuman fatalities among the soldiers at the base, the President's security detail, and the fast-responding superheroes who entered the fight. A still undisclosed number of regular Army soldiers also gave their lives defending the President.
Chicago News at Five
* * *
The next day they gave me a full-body scan with a portable rig they simply wheeled into my room. I still felt like I'd been beaten all over with baseball bats, but I could think straight and they decided that between Chakra, the surgeon, and my own super-healing abilities I could get out of bed. Listening to the news, I finally learned just what had happened.
The Ring dumped a manifesto on ViewTube right after the attack, declaring themselves a coalition of superhumans from different terrorist and nationalist groups dedicated to striking back at America. The Big One and the President's trip had put President Touches Clouds in the middle of the largest concentration of American supersoldiers in one place, ever, creating an irresistible target-of-opportunity for their debut.
They launched their attack from Mexico, taking advantage of the amazing supply airlift to hijack a cargo plane. One of them "ghosted" the plane so it came in invisible to radar. They bailed out as they closed on the base, their fliers supplying airlift like we did, while a Phantom-type superhuman flew the plane, loaded with explosives, into the ground. The impact and explosion flattened the barracks, killing hundreds of completely unprepared soldiers and supersoldiers. Before the stunned survivors could mount a coherent defense, the Ring was on them.
Whittier Base had hosted two thousand soldiers and ten eight-man supersoldier squads. Caught completely unprepared and blown halfway to hell by an explosive-loaded cargo plane and a rain of armed superhumans, they still managed to rally and put themselves between President Touches Clouds and the Ring. Nearly eight hundred soldiers and fifty supersoldiers fell that night, most in the initial fireball. We were getting the credit for saving the President, but she'd survived only because of the men who'd made a wall of their own bodies.
Before everything else, I forced myself to call home and discovered that Artemis had kept the parents and the Bees in the loop. I had no idea of the proper phone etiquette for a "Hi, I almost died but I'm feeling much better now" call, but Mom tried very hard not to cry. I did too, so I kept it brief. I couldn't talk to them about John, couldn't think about him yet, if I was going to hold it together.
Quin brought me a fresh uniform and I got dressed so I could move around the medical ward. My bathroom had only a small mirror, but even with the clean costume I knew I looked pretty bad; fading black, purple, and yellow blotches covered most of my skin, and I'd lost weight with all the fuel my body had been burning in the accelerated rebuild. I felt like I looked: hollow inside.
I turned to the door. They'd told me Blackstone was recovering nicely with Chakra's help, and his managing physician agreed to let me see him. I wanted to go home so bad I could taste it, but we weren't leaving Whittier Base until we could take him with us. Quin had an interview set up for me with Peter Harris, a war correspondent who'd been following S1, the Blue Eagles, the supersoldier squad hardest hit in the attack. Apparently the news media was prepared to storm the base to hear from the heroes who'd saved the President, and Quin settled on Mr. Harris as a solution.
Putting my hand on the latch, I found myself wondering if they'd let me see John. Not a good idea—
* * *
I sat up, covered with bits of concrete and wall plaster. Sirens blared and I could hear shouting through a big hole in my hospital room wall.
Did I do that?
Climbing to my feet I checked myself over: no new damage that I could see, but I was a mess and my head felt funny. I brushed off my cape and leaned out through the hole to wave to the soldiers on the grounds. A familiar supersoldier landed in front of me.
"Ma'am," he said. "Are you alright?"
"Yes Lieutenant Dahmer, thank you. What happened?"
My erstwhile recruiter took off his beret and ran his hand through his red buzz-cut, peering beyond me into my room. A squad formed up in the yard behind him.
"You don't know, ma'am? Something hit your building exactly—" he looked at his fancy watch "—one minute and eleven seconds ago, at thirteen twenty-seven hours."
I looked at the ground. Most of the mess was in my room, so obviously the explosion had blown inwards. "I'm sorry, lieutenant, but I don't remember anything..." Then what he'd said sank in and I nearly sat back down on the rubble-strewn floor.
"Did you say it's one thirty?"
He looked puzzled. "Yes ma'am. You're not hurt?"
I shook my head. I'd dressed to leave the room at eight.
They secured the scene in minutes, although there was nothing to secure. The wall had exploded inward for no reason they could see. I'd woken covered in dust but unharmed, with no explanation for why I'd found myself on the floor with no memory of the morning.
But I had a terrible suspicion.
They finished checking me out and asking questions, and moved me to another room. Before I washed up and changed I called Artemis. They'd quartered the rest of the team just across the base in the temporary barracks, so she knocked and poked her head in the door as I toweled my hair.
"I hear you're trashing rooms now." She closed the door before putting her hood back and peeling off her daysuit mask in the windowless room.
I startled her with a hug. "Thanks for calling home for me."
"Hey, I'm happy to—your family's great, and I'm so sorry. What's going on?"
I sat on the bed with a sigh. I felt... disconnected.
"I'm hoping you can tell me. When we first met, you told me you could do some kind of mind trick to make me forget our conversation. Were you kidding?"
She pulled up the chair by the bed. "Hardly. I use it all the time on my 'dates' so they don't remember their donation. Why?"
"I'm missing the last five hours with no trauma to account for it. The orderlies said I returned to my room to get some rest about ten minutes before the explosion, and nobody else went in or out. And— Somebody I met told me he could erase whatever memories he wanted to. Can you recover memories?"
"I've... never tried." She looked doubtful. "I don't really understand how my vampire powers interact with other stuff."
I took a deep breath. "Can you try for me? I think... I think I know what happened. At least part of it. And if I'm right it's really important that I remember."
She shook her head. "You don't want me to do that. Really. The truth is that I wasn't serious back there on the club roof. I hadn't planned on doing anything unless you totally freaked out, which you didn't."
"So why don't I want it?"
She looked uncomfortable. "For it to work I have to bite you."
"Oh. I guess that's out since biting me would be like biting an armored car."
"No, I could. It's just it's very... intimate."
Now I was sidetracked.
"But how? Your teeth are normal, aren't they? I mean, they're sharp but—"
Artemis laughed humorlessly.
"Hope, even the pointiest teeth wouldn't do what a vampire needs them to do; they'd have to be as sharp as hypodermic needles to cleanly pierce a vein—and forget about closing the holes neatly afterward so my date doesn't bleed all over the place."
"So how do you do it?"
"Dr. Beth thinks that I have a limited ability with psychic surgery. I mentally 'drill' where my teeth make contact and I heal the holes afterward the same way. All that's left are two little red bumps and a faint hickey."
"Oh." Psychic surgery seemed to work on me just fine, so she could probably do it. "If it takes a bite to help me remember, I really don't mind." Good thing Quin had brought me my skirted costume with its high collar today (it covered more bruised skin).
"You really don't know what you're asking," Artemis disagreed, running her hands through her hair. "When I bite somebody I take away their will. Just long enough to get the job done, but it's still... I don't want to do it to you."
"But why?"
"Because you'll remember afterward since that's the whole point!"
"Is it awful?"
"No! It's..."
Oh. "It's sexual?"
"Yes. No. Sort of. If I didn't make my dates forget afterward I'd be really popular." She looked uncomfortable, as if admitting a dirty secret. "Even with their memories scrubbed they leave happy."
I pulled my feet up to hug my legs, resting my forehead on my knees as I tried to think. Finally I raised my head.
"I think I understand. But I really need to know. I can't tell you why, but I think finding out could..." What? I had no way to explain.
Seconds ticked by as she looked back at me. Then she sighed, surrendering.
"Okay," she agreed. "But you've got to promise not to hold it against me." She looked wretched and I felt awful. I'd never asked her about that part of her life; so long as she didn't hurt anybody feeding I hadn't wanted to know. Maybe I'd thought it would make her too strange.
"So what do we do?" I asked.
"You don't need to do anything."
She sat on the bed beside me so I had to look across my shoulder at her. I released my legs to sit up straight, suddenly self-conscious.
You're just going to let a vampire bite you—no need to be shy.
Opening my collar, she took my chin in a cool hand. I let out a shaky breath.
This was Artemis, and I could do this. I had to do this.
"Relax," she said, "I don't bite."
I started to giggle.
"Better." She smiled and I realized how close her face was to mine—definitely inside the intimacy zone. I could see my breath stirring her hair, and her eyes were fascinating pools of star-speckled night. They grew as I stared into them. The giggles went away as I grew hyper-aware of my heartbeat and pulse. As I heated up her hand felt even cooler, a delicious contrast. Her eyes expanded until they were all I could see, the touch of her cool hand all I could think about.
Then her head dipped down, her guiding hand moving to the side of my head and the other to my shoulder, and she kissed my neck. I froze and exploded.
I didn't gasp—I couldn't move, not even to breathe. Any motion would have been involuntary anyway; I didn't want to move, didn't think of it, didn't think at all. It wasn't sexual, but my entire body seemed to glow and hot liquid light poured from my neck. A hallucination, surely? My time sense went away so that when she lifted her head and her eyes filled my universe again it could have been a second, a minute, an hour later.
Remember.
The word vibrated across my skin, echoing in my bones.
Remember.
A command, it twined itself around my resurfacing thoughts, becoming an impulse, an action as natural as my next breath.
Remember.
And I did, with a strange and fractured clarity, as if the entire morning had been a picture in stained glass and someone had taken a hammer to it. Fragments of unconnected scenes rose and evaporated as I looked at them, leaving only memories of memories, like bits of a movie.
Blackstone, gracious as always but looking pale and sad.
Hallways, chatter, questions and answers with Peter Harris.
The Anarchist, standing unsummoned in my room. Yelling. The explosion. A familiar, queasy-making blur.
A name that beat at my heart. Shelly.
I found myself head down over my knees, looking at the floor and breathing like I'd just run a pre-breakthrough mile.
"The Teatime Anarchist?" Artemis stood beside me, staring. I must have said something aloud.
I nodded. "I can explain," I said weakly.
"Nobody knows what he looks like, who he is, and he was here?"
She looked stunned, but not the way she should have been. She... oh, no.
I raised my head. "What do you know about him?" I asked.
She stared at the wall for a long moment, and when she turned she didn't see me.
"Oh God," she said. "I..."
"Jacky, you're scaring me."
And she was. I'd never seen her not in control, even when she’d been completely furious. Now she looked like she was staring into the Pit. I forced myself to unbend and stand, grabbing her arms.
"Deep breaths," I said.
She laughed painfully. I did too when I remembered who I was talking to.
I pulled her over till her legs hit the bed, sat beside her and took her hand, not saying anything. Finally she closed her eyes, hard, like someone deliberately erasing an image from their mind. Filling her lungs and looking away, she spoke in a dead voice.
"Remember what I said about my psychopathic maker? The monster turned me. Not just into a knock-off vampire. He turned me into his slave. I loved him. The way you felt just now? Blood controls, and if I'd told you to love me instead of to remember you would have, at least for a few minutes. Enough of that, it's permanent. I didn't care what he'd done to my family. I'd have done it myself if they'd still been alive and he'd asked me to. He called me his little blood-slave and I licked his boots when he pointed at them. He was going to make sisters for me to share him with, and I was happy to hear that. I wanted everybody to love my master. I was his dog."
Her grip tightened. If I'd been normal she'd have broken bones.
"One night while he was out a stranger appeared in our "crypt." He really appeared, out of nowhere, like Blackstone can. He wore a funny looking long coat and a gray nylon mask, a fancy version of the pantyhose masks you see bank robbers wear in the movies. He pointed something at me, and I was me again.
Her mouth twisted.
"I threw up my last drink and couldn't stop gagging. I wanted to die so bad, if I'd been able to make myself move I'd have staked myself on whatever I could find. When I was in control again he told me my beloved maker was going to use me to help him make a whole clan of vampires—that the city would burn on a night when we rose, that hundreds would die while he, my sisters, and I went somewhere else to do it again. Then he handed me a stake. He told me I had to live, and he'd be in touch."
She finally turned so I could see her face. It was a death-mask.
"You know what I did then." She laughed, a chilling sound.
"I don't know if I believe in God, but I pray there's a hell for my darling master to scream in till the sun goes out. I went back home. I wanted to lie down in the stripped room my mom had died in and let the sun rise through the window in the morning, burn the house down around my ashes."
I couldn't look at her dead face anymore, so I put my head against her shoulder. She flinched, then relaxed.
"But he found you again, didn't he?" I asked.
I felt her nod.
"He told me who he was and said I could make something good out of what had happened to me. That I could balance the scales a little. He gave me money to get myself set up, initial contacts, he even picked my codename. S
ometimes he'd show up with information for me to work on, leads I could develop and pass on to the police. He tipped me off about the villain fight and told me I should make real contact with you."
I started, raising my head.
"That night at The Fortress?"
"I don't know if he intended for me to tell you everything, but when you spotted my... differences, well, I figured 'why the hell not?' I didn't expect you to stalk me though."
Wearing the Cape Page 27