“Yes, I did. And I’m chasing you, of course. I find myself reduced to the roll of messenger these days, and you should know that your friends are on your trail. They can’t follow you, the way you are jumping now, but they found the first world, the one you fell into with the mirror-killer.”
“They could have found me there?” My stomach rolled, and not because of the taxi’s bumpy ride—we’d obviously left the better streets of downtown Chicago.
“If you’d stayed, which you didn’t.” Kitsune sounded dryly matter-of-fact about it. “But they know that you’re well, or at least you were when we met in the wood.” Her voice dropped almost to a purr and suddenly I was hyper-aware, having the opposite of an out-of-body experience. An in-body experience? My heart moved in my chest, beating against its cage of ribs. my blood pulsed in my ears, and I felt the heat of my skin—could have counted each small hair standing at the nape of my neck where her breath floated over it. My eyes had to be dilated a hundred times, and when her hand moved over my stomach I dropped my own to cover it.
“Dream of me?” She whispered.
“Wh-what?”
“Have you dreamed of me?
I gulped a breath. “How did you—that was you?”
“I didn’t send you one, but it’s flattering to know you dream of me on your own.”
This time I did squeak in indignation. “You tricked me!”
She laughed playfully and I shivered. “Trickster, don’t forget. I didn’t lie. I never do, that would be cheating. I would love to play with your Agent Veritas, sometime.”
Just the thought of that meeting shut down my brain for a moment. It took me a few distracted breaths—she wasn’t touching any place on me that stepped over a line, exactly, but between her intentionally aimed breathing and her hand I was finding it hard to think of anything relevant—but I realized she hadn’t really answered my question.
“Why are you here? Twice?” Why did you find me in the wood? She’d—he’d practically declared war on King Oberon for me then, and I’d been trying very hard not to wonder why since.
I felt her sigh.
“I’m a kami. A kitsune. A fox spirit.”
“I know that.” Why was I whispering, too? We were in the trunk of a moving cab.
“Mortals are who they are, not what they do. Kami are what they do.”
“Um, what?”
“When you put on the cape, you didn’t become Astra inside. Astra remained a title until you committed to it, and you could give it up if you decided it wasn’t necessary anymore.”
“Okay?”
“Kami are different. We are what we do. I trick, therefor I am. And one thing we always do is keep our promises. Once we make a promise, we want to do it. We change.”
Her hand was totally distracting me, but I tried to make sense out of that. “But we didn’t make promises—we, we promised to promise? Someday?” A bill with no due-date. Right?
“And a promise creates anticipation, a shadow of fulfilment.” Really, her voice was as distracting as her hand. Just how adventurous was Agent Grace? “I am a wild fox, but I promised to serve your family one day and so I want to. I don’t want out of my promise. I don’t want to kill every Corrigan so there is no family left to serve.”
“Y-yes, but you’re not the one who promised marriage.”
“No, but our promises are linked. They cast the same shadow, and to desire one is to desire the other. A consummation, your great playwright once said, devoutly to be wished.” Her voice deepened at the end, his hand changing under mine, growing rougher and more masculine, and he kissed the back of my neck. Oh my God.
“Yoshi?” I gasped when I could breathe.
“You like Yoshi. I live to serve.”
The cab hit a curb, bouncing us both. Agent Grace had been tall but Yoshi took up more space—or the trunk was shrinking on us. I fought for air, light-headed.
“Yoshi—”
“Your dates were amusing, but I tire of chasing after you.”
“But we haven’t even really—”
“Easily remedied.” And I found myself expertly turned so we weren’t spooning. How did he do that in a trunk? Then we were kissing. We were kissing—I could have stiff-armed him into the backseat of the cab, but instead my shaking hands grabbed the thin lapels of the suit he was now wearing and steadied us.
Oh, my.
His lips were smooth and slick as satin, and weirdly I fixated on that. “Do you gloss?” I gasped, leaning back for air. Almond eyes that had started visibly sparkling in the gloom of the closed space crinkled with laughter.
“Do I—” The laughter reached his voice. “Of course I do. You will not meet a more metrosexual creature, darling girl.” And then he used those lips on other parts of my face.
“Oh. That’s, nice. Really.” The Bees would love him.
He worked his way around a cheekbone. “Any more questions?”
“Not now.” I stretched up to catch the corner of those beautiful smooth lips.
“Good. He kissed my nose. “Because we’re here.”
“We’re—what?”
The taxi stopped, and a door slammed. Frozen somewhere between Damnit! and Oh God, what was I just doing? I barely had time to get space between us and turn to face up before the hood of the trunk opened. I blinked in the light.
“Nice thing about skintight suits,” Shelly observed, reaching in to help me out. “They don’t get wrinkled.” She wore a cabbie uniform.
“I— You—” We were in a closed-up service garage, surround by taxies.
“And it’s a very clean trunk.” Kitsune gracefully unfolded and dismounted behind me. His silver-gray suit, tailored so closely it looked sewn on, hadn’t wrinkled either. He could have smirked. Or smiled knowingly, or winked, or done something else to make me want to slap his face off. He didn’t; we might as well have been discussing post-Pulse politics.
Shelly pulled me into a quick hug, hooked my arm and led me away from the cab with Kitsune following. “You do seem to get captured a lot.”
“The last two don’t count. They were the good guys.”
“Point!” She laughed, glanced back at Kitsune. “Thanks, hot-stuff. The crew is meeting in an hour in the break room over there. If you go outside, wear someone else’s face.”
He looked at me and his perfect lips twitched, widening into a smile as my face heated up. “I do wish to stretch my legs, and will see you ladies in an hour.” He turned on his heels and headed for the door under the green-lit exit sign.
“Wow!” Shelly fanned herself. “So that’s Kitsune. I can see why you want to get home so bad.”
I groaned, ran fingers through my hair. “You couldn’t have, I don’t know, stopped and let us out after we got some distance?”
“Couldn’t.” She led me into the breakroom. It smelled like stale takeout and mildew. “I picked up my fare, dropped off my fare, called in a mechanical problem and drove right to the garage. Keeping it clean means fewer street-cams I have to mess with as Cypher.”
I plopped down on the ratty couch. Did we stop during the ride? I vaguely remembered a car door slamming but I’d been… Admit it, you were hot to trot and eating his face. It was like the teenage party game Seven Minutes of Heaven except we hadn’t been sharing a closet with clothes. And now you’re going to dream of teenage party games with Kitsune. I didn’t think it was possible for me to flush any hotter.
“So, you really drive a taxi?” My voice broke on taxi and Shelly snickered.
“Hey, they’re everywhere. ’Course I usually look a bit different—I wore my Shelly-shell tonight because of the meeting.”
“The meeting?”
“Sure. I pulled Brian and Jamal in after you got picked up last night, figured that the protectors of truth and justice would sweep them up too, since we’d reached out to them. Brian got away from your ambushed meeting with something called Travel Dust? Then when Kitsune showed up and we realized we could pull a rescue, I decided
to keep us to The Plan. What does Kitsune do, back there? She has mad resources.”
“Rescue—” The whole trunk thing had completely derailed my moment of befuddlement at seeing—“Mal! Blindspot is Mal! How is that possible?”
Shelly sat in one the steel chairs. “Mal had his breakthrough after the Pulse, hiding his family from looters. You know him?”
“Yeah, as a Young Sentinel named Megaton! He is not inconspicuous! He blows stuff up!”
She whistled. “Wow, that’s an interesting data-point.” In the Future Files that we both knew about, new potential futures always meant a whole new crop of breakthroughs; people experiencing breakthroughs in more than one future event were rare. “So he was a natural just waiting to happen, I guess?”
I rubbed my eyes. “At least tell me his family is okay and all together?”
“Well, yeah. Sydney is just the cutest little thing.”
“That’s nice.” At least something had turned out better, here. Even if Mal was a supervillain, he’d choose his family in a heartbeat over being a cape. “So with Blindspot and Kitsune, and I assume Cypher to hack their video records, you guys pulled a complete Blackstone on them. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it—the best kind of jailbreak is one where they didn’t see it happen and will always wonder how the hell it happened. And your bag is right over there in the third locker. I packed everything and added some stuff, we can get you on your way any time.” She sucked at sounding casual about that.
“Shelly…”
“I know, you’ve got to go. But we’ve got the crew together. We can complete the mission!”
I dropped my head back to stare at the ceiling. Since Veritas had shut me down I’d avoided thinking about The Mission at all. And now it was back on the table. A digustingly sticky breakroom table, sure, but what had Veritas said? My just being here was putting DSA precognitives out of commission? He, or his boss, was scared enough that they were willing to basically get me out of town on the next bus instead of take a chance I could make things better.
But bringing the Ascendant down had to be a good thing, right?
I scrubbed my face. The responsible thing would just be to follow my half-formed idea of earlier tonight, dump everything I knew about Dr. Pellegrini, The Ascendancy, and the Wreckers on Shelly, and go. She and Vulcan could figure out what to do with it—even with a shady source, the DSA had to move on something like that.
But could they do it by themselves? Back home, after the Ascendancy announced itself by hitting the Detroit Supermax, internal investigations had shown that Dr. Pellegrini’s government connections had been deep. Could the federal agencies launch the kind of quiet investigation they’d need to, confirm what I could tell them, without Pellegrini learning about it in time to disappear and erase his trail again? Or would history just repeat itself?
And what about home? Here or there, the Ascendant was dangerous. Nobody knew, nobody, when he might make another Temblor or Green Man, trigger another city shattering quake or a bigger disaster with some ultra-boosted breakthrough. Even without that, the Ascendancy was all about superhuman supremacy; the post-Pulse chaos had to suit them just fine. They’d probably helped it along.
Hadn’t Shelly said something about a superhuman freehold? I’d almost bet that was them, and she’d said that the Wreckers were active.
Maybe that’s why they haven’t come out in the open as the Ascendancy here—they don’t have to. They’re getting it done.
And back home, Dr. Pellegrini could decide they’d benefit from just this kind of Grimworld mess, and make it happen. If I didn’t take this chance, here, where I could get to him in a way that he just wasn’t vulnerable to anymore back home…
Shelly let me sit and think, not trying to press her argument; another way she was just a bit different from my Shellys. Finally, I straightened up with a sigh. “Is there bottled water in that fridge? And how much time is left before the meeting? I need you to research, and can I go outside?”
It turned out that the service garage sat in a basement below a mixed business-residence building, and the rooftop featured an urban vegetable garden (apparently a new trend accelerated by peoples’ experience of post-Pulse food insecurity). The screening trellises for the climbing plants blocked easy line-of-sight observation from anything not directly overhead, and Shelly was watching for that. I took the elevator to the top floor and the stairs to the roof.
Clouds hung low over the lit city, with the smell of rain. The low clouds forced the jetliners descending on O’Hare into a closer approach, and their distant engines glowed like a string of giant fireflies in my sight. I couldn’t see any human flyers out, and wondered if any capes flew regular night patrols anymore. Too dangerous?
Finding an old lawn chair I sat, rested my chin in my hands, and tried to empty my mind. I pushed away thoughts of my family here, of Kitsune’s apparent new plan to seduce me into marriage, of Shelly and Jamal, Mal and Brian.
As a cape, a CAI hero, I was duty-bound to uphold the rule of law. That duty hadn’t disappeared because I was in another reality. I’d severely bent that duty last year in my trip to Japan, violating the territorial sovereignty of another nation, but I’d never tried to physically resist the legal authority of its representatives.
Now I’d passively participated in a jailbreak, after fleeing the proper authorities here and recruiting a crew for a very criminal caper. And I was still planning on breaking and entering. Property theft. Very possibly assault and battery, depending on if we met any real resistance.
I laughed unhappily. When had I become a vigilante? I’d always tried to keep Jacky from that dark side of “superheroing” once we had dragged her into the Sentinels. Jacky… I straightened, breathing a little easier. I’d never condemned Jacky’s whole Dark Avenger vigilante project, back when we first met; she’d been fighting very bad people, in ways the police and courts couldn’t. She’d made whole street gangs stop victimizing their neighbors and fear the night. I’d only ever worried about what she’d been doing because sooner or later superhuman vigilantes ended with jail.
That, and I didn’t think the role of night-stalking Dark Vigilante could be healthy for anybody, especially not for a friend who was already something dark.
But at least I wasn’t being hypocritical—or I didn’t think so. Veritas wanted me gone, I’d get gone. Tomorrow, succeed or fail, I’d turn the globe and jump to my next adventure. Whatever that would be. And I’d try and manage it so that my teammates here—and they were my teammates even if they’d never met me—could get what Jacky got; a chance to come in out of the cold.
I felt the first drop on my head, and then the night filled with the light patter of an easy spring shower. Tilting my face up, I let the rain bless my decision.
I spent my last few minutes on the roof going over Shelly’s discoveries and finding out if she could deliver what I thought we’d need to pull it off tonight, and when I came back downstairs I found everybody waiting in the garage, where Shell had dragged the breakroom table to give us more room. With no visored helmet or wig and shades, the broken star of my costume crest was enough that Jamal made the connection first and his eyes widened.
“Holy shit—you’re dead.”
Mal didn’t look surprised—but he’d walked out of the DSA station with me so he’d gotten a nice long look. Brian looked like he’d seen weirder things and didn’t much care. I folded my arms. “I get that a lot. To clear the deck, yes I’m Hope Corrigan, Astra. No, I’m not back from the grave. I’m—” I tapped my chest “—not from around here. You guys have seen enough ‘alternate world’ shows where the hero is the villain or we’re all anthropomorphized mammals or something. Back home, I didn’t die at Whittier Base. And here’s the thing, where I came from I know all of you. Back there, Mal, Brian, Jamal, you’re Sentinels. The Young Sentinels. You’re capes. The good guys. You called us the freaking white hats, Jamal.” I looked at each of the boys in turn, ignoring Kitsune for now.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell any of you what this was about, before, but tonight I need you to be my team again. Because tonight I’m going after the Ascendant.”
I smiled tightly at the growl I heard coming from Grendel. “Brian here has a score to settle with the Ascendant. It might not be personal for the rest of you, but even here and with everything that’s happened since I’ve been…gone, the Ascendant’s at the top of the DSA’s most-wanted list. Before I leave I intend to make sure that they get him. But here’s the thing.”
Channeling Lei Zi from every action briefing I could remember, I leaned forward and I locked eyes with each of them again, even—this time especially—Kitsune. “This is going to be a clean job. We take it as far as we can, with cutouts when we can abandon it if we have to, to make sure that no civilians get hurt—not even bad guys. We’re not the law, we’re not serving a warrant, we don’t have the legal right to use force. That means I’m not getting you guys into anything that would look worse on a rap sheet than a B&E unless it goes completely south.
“And how’s that going to work?” Brian had control of his vocal cords, but I heard no deep subharmonic undertones like he got when he was ready to seriously tear into somebody. “How do we get The Ascendant without fighting anybody?”
“I didn’t say no fighting, I said no hurting civilians. But we’re not going at him directly—we’re getting the evidence the DSA needs to do it for us and they’ll do it good and hard. I’m sorry, Brian.” I tried a smile on him. “I know how bad you want him, but it has to be this way. Ozma wouldn’t want you in jail, and neither do I.”
Jamal folded his arms. “This doesn’t sound like my usual delivery job. What’s in it for me?”
“Triple the fee for your last delivery job—I’ve got a good paymaster. Or if you want, I can get you what you have back home, a second chance and an apprenticeship with Sifu.” I shrugged like his choice didn’t matter to me. “Mal? I don’t know what you need, but—”
Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers Page 24