Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “You can’t blame them,” Lethe said, standing up. “They wouldn’t have wanted you to come here. Wolfe served us for a time, and it didn’t end well for him.” That was an understatement. He’d ended up bent to the service of Omega, at least somewhat unwittingly.

  “And Harmon had his own obligations to us,” Hades said. “We provided him material support for his plans. Helped him—”

  “With the serum,” I said.

  Hades shrugged. “We didn’t know what he had planned for it until very late. Once we did, obviously I prepared to act. We believed he had more traditional villainy in mind.”

  “Well, way to screw up on that one,” I said. My head definitely hurt, though whether it was from the blinding flash or these new revelations. “It’s all starting to make some sense. But only some. You couldn’t bring me here until now, because until you had the cover of nukes …”

  “You would not have been safe,” Hades said.

  “And we would have rhetorically raised the stakes against all metahumans in the process of giving you that shelter,” Lethe said. “They’d bomb us to nothing and use the justification that we’re Weapons of Mass Destruction. And once that line of reasoning was applied once …”

  “Would it be a far hike to believe it could be used again against our people?” Hades asked. “Pogroms have been started with less justification.”

  “Seems like a big leap,” I said. “But … no, not utterly unreasonable. I still don’t know if I believe you haven’t worked against me some, too, though.” I eyed the serum, which he still held in his hand. “And I really don’t know how to feel about that.”

  “Feel strongly about it,” Hades said, “as in feel how strong it will make you, having the power of my type, to rip out a soul at a distance, boosted to extremes never before seen in human history.” He clenched the serums in his hand before me. “Imagine being able to reach across the planet and take the very soul out of President Gondry if need be.” His eyes flashed. “And I have a very bad feeling … it may come to just that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Why was power such a tricky thing for me to take up?

  I didn’t have an answer for Hades, at least not immediately. He’d accepted that relatively graciously, and so had Lethe, and with a nod and a “Think about it” from him and a “Call me if you need anything” from her, they’d left me alone in my room to recuperate from my recent bout of blindness.

  Alone in my castle room, with the sun going down outside my tiny window, darkness falling outside over the city of Bredoccia in the distance, alone, kind of afraid to go out for fear General Krall would spider-monkey jiu jitsu squeeze me to death if I wandered too far afield.

  There were still spots in my eyes, and I was still getting used to the stale, somewhat stuffy smell of the castle. I eyed the window, wishing I could open it, but there was no sign of latches or hinges. It was for viewing only, and I wasn’t in the mood for a view.

  I settled back on the bed, and eventually, sick of my own thoughts, the disorienting whirling of my mind circling the fact that my great-grandfather Hades and my grandmother Lethe were still alive, running a country, and now raising all manner of hell on the geopolitical scene.

  And now they wanted me … little old me … to truly embrace the power of death and become a Hades.

  I blew air through my lips, and they made a spluttering noise in the darkening room, shadows lengthening across my bed.

  Me.

  With the power to rip a soul out of a human at ten feet. A hundred feet. Hell, a mile, for all I knew.

  That’d trivialize the hell out of any fight I ever got in. I moved my hand, picturing ripping the life out of a person with but a flick of my fingers.

  That’d beat the hell out of … well … beating the hell out of them.

  It’d be like a Star Wars force choke, but with one little drawback that everyone seemed to lose sight of in their mad rush for power. And oh, boy, did the average person feel a mad rush for power. How many times had I been seated next to someone on a plane, had someone come up to me in a restaurant, or on the street … always with the same look on their face, of disguised awe and faint curiosity … always with the same damned question, every time. I could almost pick them out before they asked at this point.

  “Why don’t you just absorb every meta with powers?” they asked, this endless chorus of (mostly) well-meaning people. “Why not just take … all the powers?”

  Like Rose, they mean, but of course they’ve never heard of Rose.

  I always answer them in the same way. First, I plaster on a smile, one I’ve practiced in the mirror for … probably days of cumulative time. “That’s a great question,” I say, patronizingly if I’m tired and drained. Patiently, if I’m not. Then I explain.

  In order to drain a metahuman … I have to drain that metahuman. Kill them.

  “But so many of the people you fight deserve it!” they say.

  How can I argue that? Because why I else would I be kicking their ass if they didn’t deserve it? This is the chief reason why—despite whatever the press is reporting about me today—I’m not out just draining some random old lady off the street:

  The people I kill are hardened killers, in most cases. Their souls are calloused by their deeds. I know what that feels like; it took me a while to work up to killing, and I still hesitate before going that last mile and ending someone. At least, I do when I have a moment to hesitate.

  But see, after I drain this person, they don’t just go away like a person I’ve killed. The coroner comes and gets the body, sure, but the person, the essence of them …

  Well, if I take their power … I’m stuck with their soul essentially forever.

  Eight souls. That was how many I’d drained in my time. Seven with powers. One without.

  Six of them had been stuck in my head for five years. One for a year or so. One for about sixty seconds before he got sucked out. RIP Frankie, little did I know ye.

  Those others, though? Wolfe, Gavrikov, Bjorn, Zack, Eve, Bastian and Harmon?

  Shit, man. Wolfe and Gavrikov had killed tens of thousands between them. Gavrikov had killed thousands in one thirty-second period. Bjorn was a serial rapist and murderer. Eve and Bastian had done some pretty questionable things. Harmon had killed has his own wife. Even Zack had done a thing or two that made my skin crawl, including being coerced into dating me by our old boss.

  Having someone stuck in your head was like a marriage you couldn’t get out of, I wanted to say to those people on the streets. Like being married to someone who’d murdered, who’d raped, who’d slaughtered, who’d maimed, who’d drunk deep of the suffering of others—because that’s who we were talking about, people worthy of being killed for their deeds. It was asking me to be totally cool with sticking a superpowered version of Richard Starkweather or Douglas Clark or Whitey Bulger or Jeffrey Dahmer in my head for the possibly thousands of years I potentially had in front of me. Together, forever, till death or a Scottish succubus did us part.

  Forever, united with the worst scum I could imagine.

  Yeah. It was a real mystery why I didn’t absorb every evil bastard I encountered just “for the powers.”

  Or not, since I’d use their powers on average once a week, maybe, but hear their voice in my frigging head always, unless I pulled a Mom and locked them away when not in use. Which tended to make them not so much want to cooperate when I actually did need their powers.

  Or I could torture them into buckling and rendering themselves utterly into my service. That’s what Rose had done. And, y’know, I was definitely aspiring to be like the flame-tressed hellbeast who’d salted the earth of my already ruined life.

  Did I want the power that came with the serum? The Hades abilities? The souls I could drain and put to use?

  Sure. I wasn’t stupid. I was always fighting, and it’d have been really nice to pull out a Thor-type’s electrical bolts when someone came at me with eye lasers, or do a Wolfe and rapid
heal when someone carved my guts out with fingernail claws. Or just have Achilles abilities and not even get hurt in the first place.

  That would be awesome. I would love that.

  The voices in my head it’d take to get there?

  Well, power has its price.

  “I don’t want it,” I muttered under my breath, lying on the bed, staring at the blank TV in front of me. I’d been doing that since Hades and Lethe had left, and finally, I’d had enough. Fumbling at the nightstand, I came up with the remote for the TV and clicked it on.

  “Oh, man,” I groaned as the screen resolved into a cable news show with an anchor solemnly droning to his audience as he stared into the camera as a chyron below him blared BREAKING NEWS.

  “Sienna Nealon, the most dangerous woman on the planet, has escaped federal custody to the eastern European country of Revelen …”

  “Yeah, I already knew that,” I said. “That’s not breaking news to me.”

  “To analyze this situation, we have Russ Bilson, a former aide to the Harmon administration—”

  A smug man appeared on a split-screen to the anchor’s left. I rolled my eyes and let out another groan. I’d seen him before, many times. Russ Bilson seemed like he was a paid, professional Sienna Nealon critic. Which probably paid better than being the actual Sienna Nealon these days, though I was curious as to who exactly was paying him.

  “—and a former associate of Ms. Nealon’s—”

  I groaned yet again. The people that the news claimed were my associates were seldom actually associated with me. I mean, they’d claimed that Owen Traverton, the guy who posed as my dog, was an “associate” of mine. When I hadn’t even known he was human, for crying out loud. If being a dog and spying on me for my enemies counted as being my associate, then, uh … well … he was probably my only associate.

  But they’d taken to picking random former employees of my agency and calling them “former associates.” A lot of them I couldn’t have picked out of a crowd. But they showed up on TV regularly, and boy did they seem to have a lot to say about me for people who I couldn’t recall meeting even once.

  “—and joining us from his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, former senator and presidential nominee—”

  I sat up in bed.

  “—Robb Foreman. Senator, welcome to the program.”

  Robb Foreman’s dark face appeared in a split-screen to the anchor’s right, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “Thanks for having me, Chris.”

  Huh. For once, they’d actually found a genuine “former associate” of mine. Weird. I shrugged. Even a blind squirrel found an acorn every now and then, though, I supposed.

  “What we have here,” Chris, the anchor/talking head said, whiffling a sheet of paper self-importantly in front of him, “is a very unique situation. We have public enemy number one, in the form of Sienna Nealon, who has escaped from a federal prison designed specifically to incarcerate people with her type of abilities, and she’s fled all the way to an Eastern European country none of us had heard of until today—”

  “I’d heard of Revelen before today,” Robb Foreman said, eyes still twinkling.

  “Well, fine,” Chris the anchor-head said, recovering quickly, “a place those of us who haven’t spent time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hadn’t heard of before today.”

  “I was never on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,” Foreman said, showing his deep amusement as Chris’s face fell a little.

  “The point is, Senator,” Chris said, “it’s a unique situation. A murderer has escaped custody, she’s run to a country that, according to the State Department website,” and here he glanced at the paper he’d been waving, “we have no extradition treaty with. This is unprecedented.”

  Foreman raised an eyebrow. “No, it’s not unprecedented. You haven’t ever heard of Joanne Chesimard?”

  “I don’t know who this Chesimard person is—” Chris started to say.

  “Look, Joanne Chesimard didn’t kill over two hundred people,” Bilson said, talking right past Chris Anchor-head. “It’s an issue of scale, Senator. Sienna Nealon is often referred to as the most dangerous person on the planet. We should take that threat seriously, especially when—”

  “Sienna Nealon has the potential to be dangerous,” Foreman talked over him, “but I object to the idea that she’s the most dangerous person on the planet. She’s only dangerous to the criminal threats. To the rest of us, just going about our lives, she’s no more hazardous than a Chihuahua.”

  “Uh … thanks?” I said. “I guess?”

  “Chihuahuas are a very dangerous animal,” Chris said. “I’ve lost the heels of more than a few pairs of socks to my wife’s Chihuahua. They’re mean, intemperate—”

  “I think I see where Chris is going with this,” Bilson stepped in again, probably trying to save Chris from making himself look even stupider than he already had. “And he’s right—Sienna Nealon has proven herself to be a very dangerous person. And not just to the ‘criminal threats’ as the Senator asserts. She’s hurt and killed innocent people—”

  “Prove it,” Foreman said.

  Bilson looked like a brick wall had just leapt in front of him as he was bicycling toward it full force. “Uh, well …” he countered with a fake, plastered-on grin. “… I’m not in charge of proving it, and the people who are have already held a trial—”

  “Whoa, wait a second,” Chris said, comically large brow now evidencing a hint of a furrow through layers of Botox. “Sienna Nealon has already been tried? We haven’t heard anything about that.”

  Bilson looked momentarily dumbstruck. “Well … I can’t confirm that—”

  “I’ve heard the same,” Foreman said, “through some old government sources I’m still in contact with.” The twinkle in his eyes was turned down a notch, but I knew the man, and he was evincing more than a hint of triumph. If he hadn’t just used his empath powers to steer Bilson into this particular wall, and then given him an extra shove to keep him from backpedaling … well, I’d eat the comforter I was lying on. “Nice to hear it confirmed by others.”

  “I’m … not confirming,” Bilson said, and there was a hint of panic forming on his plain face. “It’s not confirmed, it’s just—”

  “Has Sienna Nealon actually been through a trial?” Chris asked, leaning in. All three of them, while talking to each other, were facing the camera and staring at me, which was a totally normal thing when you’re just watching the news and they’re chattering about any old subject, but which felt strangely intense when the people on the screen were talking about you. “She was captured less than a week ago.”

  “Four days ago, in fact,” Foreman said, taking the opportunity to drive the knife a little deeper. Now he was wearing his concerned face. “Four days, and she’s already been tried and sentenced.” His brow was lined, and his mood dark. “There was no plea, according to my sources. Which means that she was tried for any number of capital crimes and sentenced in a matter of days.”

  Chris was blinking, trying to take in this new information. “Well … she is subject to the metahuman criminal justice system—”

  “Which is a shadow criminal justice system,” Foreman said, and he was like a dog with a bone, not letting up at all. “Completely unaccountable, utterly lacking transparency. Think about it, Chris. If you were accused of a crime falsely—or even accurately—how would you like it if not a word of it was spoken aloud outside of a secret courtroom, with no chance to prepare a defense, no counsel even offered?”

  “We don’t know that any of that happened—” Chris said.

  “Oh, it happened,” Foreman said, and his voice was rising. “She was railroaded into a sham trial, given no opportunity to defend herself, not allowed to consult with her attorney or even offered a court-appointed one, in a complete violation of the Fifth Amendment—and all in the name of this ‘separate but supposedly equal’ metahuman criminal justice system.”

  “Those are loa
ded terms and that’s … that’s a bit of a reach—” Bilson started to say.

  “No, it’s not, and I think of the three of us, I’m the most qualified to say so,” Foreman said, not even breaking stride as he verbally rapped Bilson across the nose. Bilson blanched, paling a little under his fake tan.

  I balled a fist and pumped it. Foreman had dunked on him in my name, and it was beautiful.

  “This metahuman justice system is a complete perversion of everything our Constitution was intended to protect against. You may not like Sienna Nealon, you may even believe her guilty of terrible crimes—which I don’t, by the way—” Foreman said.

  “This is ridiculous,” Bilson said, throwing up his hands very theatrically. “She is a criminal. I understand if maybe she’s on your good side because she killed your opponent from the last election—”

  “That’s a pretty vicious accusation,” Foreman said, calm as a still lake at sunrise. “I’d like to see you prove it, though I suspect that much like the rest of your rigmarole about Ms. Nealon, you can’t.”

  Bilson just smirked. “Everyone knows she did it.”

  “‘Everyone knows’ that if you swallow gum, it stays in your digestive tract for seven years, too,” Foreman shot back. “It’s still false, no matter how many people believe it.”

  “That gum thing is totally true,” Chris said.

  “But regardless of what you believe about her guilt or innocence,” Foreman said, “mere accusation, in our system, is not supposed to result in punishment. That was the lesson of Salem, in case you skipped class the day they read The Crucible. Sienna Nealon is entitled to her day in court, an attorney to represent her, a chance to prepare a defense and examine the evidence and witnesses against her. These are the systemic safeguards against us bringing the force of the government against the innocent, against locking up or executing an innocent person based solely on popular sentiment and mass hysteria, and you cannot tell me that she had those opportunities to defend herself in less than three days.”

  “We don’t know whether she did or didn’t,” Bilson said. “She—I mean—this is all very speculative—”