The moment my butt settled on the seat I had a different question. Was this going to work, or was it going to get me killed? I pedaled a couple of times, and I couldn’t wait. There, on the other side of the intersection. I shoved down hard on the pedal… and the houses skipped around me. I wobbled, mostly because I felt like I’d been riding uphill to get here, but my tight muscles eased up in seconds. So, it worked with a bicycle. Would it work with my light bike? A car?
A crawling nervousness itched between my shoulder blade at those thoughts. How far could I take these experiments before failure got me killed? Was this a warning straight from my super power, or just nerves?
Pedestrians up ahead. My body tightened as I teleported past them, then relaxed. Then I looked back over my shoulder at their bemused faces. HA!
Just keep an eye out on clear spaces ahead. Coming up on the next intersection, I waited until I got close, aimed past the dressed up couple standing at the corner, pushed down, and appeared perfectly in place, still zooming along, AH HA HA!
I headed down to Hollywood Ave. Biking past the hospitals would normally be impossible. On Hollywood, the buildings went from tree lined residential to densely packed urban real fast. I turned the corner. There were the hospitals ahead of me, alright. Packs of pedestrians everywhere.
I was so going to kill someone, starting with me.
I couldn’t help myself.
Across the intersection. Jump past the nurses at the hot dog wagon. Pedal a few times through an open stretch. Before the doctors ahead of me could try to dive out of the way, I teleported past them, and—yikes, wheelchair! Down the block, across the intersection, I shoved down on the pedal and jumped!
That had been too far. The world skipped, and I was on the other side of the big intersection, but my arms and legs felt like lead. But I’d made it. I took it easy down the peaceful stretch as Hollywood turned into Sunset before it turned into Cesar Chavez. Well, peaceful-er. Skipping little intersections and bouncing past an occasional shopper wasn’t hard at low speed. Being able to coast on a bicycle really took the sting out of the teleports.
I should have gotten on the Red Line, but I just had to take this downtown. Without having to stop at intersections, I zoomed. The street got more and more urban, and I saw the big buildings of downtown off to the right and turned down Hill street, which was really easy since I could just hop right across to the other side of the street to do it.
I started to feel like a bit of an idiot. Without my parents to take me or hopping a Red Line train, I didn’t know where the library was or where Pershing Square was. That was the subway exit I was looking for. Sure, it was down here somewhere, but I could be wandering around for a while, and this hill I coasted down now was going to be a major pain getting back up even with teleportation powers.
Or I could get lucky, and, as I pulled up to an intersection between two huge ratty buildings, that could be Pershing Square right across from me, layers of concrete like an ornate but barren park. Ray could be standing there by the subway exit, leaning against a pay phone and scanning the crowd under the brim of his big black hat.
I gave the pedal a gentle push, teleported right up in front of him, and shoved on the brake. Then I slid off the seat and tried not to breathe hard from that last jump. I couldn’t look less cool than my minion, right?
He wasn’t going to make it easy on me. He tipped his hat, dropped it back in place, and grinned like a maniac. “Come here often, beautiful?”
I might be the first girl in history with giant brown braided pigtails to be on the receiving end of that line. I didn’t have a comeback, so I changed the subject. “Is Claire not here yet?”
His eyebrows tilted up. Apparently I’d just said something hilarious. Okay, so I guess I’d made pretty good time. To cut off whatever joke was fermenting in his brain, I asked, “Does that girl look familiar?”
Ray followed my gaze to the young woman with the long, straight, black hair. In jeans and a hipster tee-shirt with a summoning circle on it, she sure didn’t stand out from the downtown crowd, so why was she standing out from the downtown crowd? Besides the way she looked right at us.
“I think that’s Lucyfar,” Ray answered in a hush, just before the blackness started crawling up the woman’s legs.
Black shapes crystallized in the air. I got a glimpse of one of them plunging toward my face, then the world tumbled around me. The tightness was Ray’s arms, and we hit the ground with me on top of him, rolled, and he swung right back up into a crouch.
Three of Lucyfar’s signature black knives hovered in the air like snakes. Really? Twice in one day, and the second ambush by Lucyfar? I was going to murder Claire, if I lived to have the chance.
One of those knives eased forward. Ray’s arms tightened, but I shoved both hands against him, shouting, “I can take care of myself!” He let me go. All three knives swerved to focus on me, and I didn’t give them time to strike. I lurched forward. Even in this position the teleport rings activated, and I staggered to my feet behind a palm tree. I looked around to spot Lucyfar, and we caught each other’s eyes as she looked around to spot me. Black knives moved in a blur, and I leaped forward, aiming for the far side of the street.
That was too much. I collapsed against a parked car and gulped air as black edged around my vision. I had to be stronger than this, or at least smarter.
Across the street I saw the notch missing from the palm tree I’d hidden behind. Lucyfar had returned her attention to Ray. He ducked behind the railing of a subway escalator as a knife went over his head, then catapulted back over top in its wake. The other two knives slammed down at him, and he backflipped, ducked behind a trash can and then out the other side as a knife blow made the metal frame ring.
It didn’t matter. She still had a knife between herself and him. This was not a fair fight. Black hair floated around Lucyfar’s head, and liquid black magic covered her like a gown. Her knives were more like spear heads, phantom fleur-de-lis blades made of the same black magic.
No one was screaming. Sure, the crowd had parted, but cars rubbernecked instead of fleeing. I saw a college student in a backpack just circling around and going on her way up the street. My parents joked about how jaded LA had become with superhero battles, but criminy!
I didn’t have time for that. As long as Lucyfar kept her attention on Ray, he couldn’t close. Sooner rather than later, she’d hit him. But she’d stopped looking for me.
We were downtown. I scanned the sidewalk until I saw an old glass bottle. With one step I teleported over to it, grabbed it up off the ground, and, with another, I teleported back across the street and threw it at Lucyfar’s head. It wouldn’t hit her. With my aim? Forget it. But her head turned at the motion, and one of her knives swung around to smack the bottle out of the way. Ray saw a chance and charged forward. He could really move, but he wouldn’t beat the knives swinging in to intercept him. I took a step, and, after the world stopped whirling, I saw the black thing I’d jumped next to was Ray. I latched hold of him, and, as he dragged me forward, I threw out a foot and aimed right behind Lucyfar.
We appeared right there. She loomed right in front of me, a skinny figure clouded in floating black like the reaper himself. Ray pivoted, jumped up, and kicked her in the middle of her back below the shoulder blades.
That knocked her off her feet, bent at an awkward angle. If she’d been a regular human, that would have meant “goodbye, spine,” but she so wasn’t a regular human. Before she hit, four more blades appeared in the air between her and us. Pointed at us, of course.
I needed to teleport us again. There was the little problem that my arms and legs felt like concrete and I was only upright because I clung desperately to Ray.
Lucyfar landed on the pavement. The knives didn’t so much as flicker. Her laugh, crazy and bouncing up and down, rang out over the plaza as she pushed herself up on her arms.
“I can’t believe you guys are twelve! What a ride!” she cackled.
&nb
sp; “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?!” Claire squealed behind us. She skated right past us, past the knives that rolled out of her way, and propped her fists on her hips to glare down at Lucyfar from the hood of her bear pajamas.
“I don’t do anything in heaven’s name. You ought to know that by—” Lucyfar started to joke. Then she made the mistake of looking up, and immediately threw her arms over her face. “Okay, okay! Turn off the juice, please!”
Looking at the stumpy little bear body in those loose pajamas, it was way too easy to imagine Claire’s baby blue eyes glowering behind her oversized glasses and her mouth squeezed into an angry pout—
I put my arms over my eyes. Maybe it would help a little. At least I knew what was happening to me.
Visions of how adorable Claire must look no longer plagued me. Maybe she had turned it down after all.
I risked a peek to find Claire sliding back up to Ray and me, holding out her hands. Ray took one. I couldn’t take the other. My whole body hurt, and the only thing holding me up was being draped over Ray. I probably should have been enjoying that, but my lungs and muscles were too busy screaming.
“I was just testing them. Gabriel’s video sucked. I can tell you’re new, but you kids have a lot of talent. I never expected you to get a hit in,” Lucyfar explained. She was all casual now, although, as she walked over to us, she winced and gave her back a twist to stretch the spot where Ray kicked her.
“Lucyfar comes to visit sometimes. She didn’t say she was inviting us down here for an ambush,” Claire told me and Ray in a gruff aside.
Lucyfar took Claire’s irritation in stride. “If I hadn’t seen your costume hanging in your closet, I’d never have guessed. That thing you do with your face works.”
I was too tired to ask, which gave Ray a chance to break in. “Speaking of which, one of us is in her civilian identity.” His face jerked at me. Sometime during the fight he’d managed to put on that black bird mask of his.
Lucyfar nodded. “It’ll be fine, but we’ll get you out of here just in case. Put this on.” A black baseball cap writhed into existence in front of me, and I tucked my braids up underneath it and pulled it as low as I could over my head.
What was Lucyfar up to? I let go of Ray, settling wobbily onto my own feet, but I still couldn’t hide my suspicious expression. With a not-at-all-guilty grin, she apologized. “I’m sorry about that. I invited you here for a social occasion, but I just couldn’t resist.”
“It was an honor. We learned a great deal,” Ray assured her. I guess if he didn’t mind, I didn’t have much place to. The knives had mostly been pointed at him.
“I bet you did. That’s the scary part.” Lucyfar pointed down at the next intersection. “Come on. I want you to meet my friends. We’ve got a place right down there.”
Walk right off a main thoroughfare downtown and the looming skyscrapers become dingy mixtures of boarded-up windows and tiny hole-in-the-wall stores. I swear we passed five pawn shops in a row. These bracelets were going to be the death of me, but I was recovering quickly. By the time we crossed the street again, Lucyfar strutting ahead of us with her hands in her pockets, I didn’t need to lean on anybody and only felt kinda stiff.
“It’ll be Pandemonium. I’d place money on it,” Ray told me with a whisper and a nudge. He meant the dusty bronze sign over the door three shops ahead.
Clashing beeps and pops drifted down the street from that door. A secret lair in an arcade? Still, “No way I’m taking that bet.”
“We need a ridiculous pun to name our lair,” Claire whispered into the huddle.
“Can we not refer to it as a lair? How about a base? Or the morality-neutral ‘secret laboratory’?” I asked helplessly. That helplessness nagged at me. I was having enough trouble turning around my reputation without palling around with Lucyfar, who was famously on whatever side she felt like that morning.
Actually, Lucyfar might be the perfect person to get tips from.
Another shoulder nudge from Ray interrupted my descent into brooding. Lucyfar swerved left into the arcade’s front door. I gave Ray a look of exasperated concession to reward his triumphant grin. He’d figured it out first, after all.
We followed Lucyfar into the arcade, and it occurred to me I’d never set foot in one before. Seen them on TV, heard about them from my parents, sure, but never actually been in one. It immediately became obvious why. The rows of machines were all complicated driving games and shooters with fake guns as controls. Not my thing.
I began to wonder if we’d get a fancy secret door or elevator as we threaded our way toward the back. There weren’t a lot of customers to see us use it, but nope. Lucyfar opened up an Employees Only door in the back wall, and we stepped in after her into a relentlessly brown room. Beat-up, brown leather sofa, wood walls, not well lit, that sort of thing.
The room was occupied, and not by regular folks. “You did it. I can’t believe it. How can you already know The Inscrutable Machine?” the floating gray girl in the shadowy back corner gasped.
“The devil’s own luck,” Lucyfar answered. She’d gone quiet and casual during the walk, but now she grinned, sauntered around a brown table, and threw herself into a ragged, brown easy chair.
“Assuming those aren’t fake costumes. These could be any three kids,” objected the brown skinned guy with the spiky, gelled hair and all the muscles. His old denim jacket and loose jeans made him look like a rougher thug than pants around his knees ever could. My heart skipped faster as he stepped up to us, scowling in disbelief. His eyes looked straight into mine. Brown, then green, then gray, they changed with his breath as he reached for my chin.
He didn’t get there. Ray’s hand shot up and grabbed his wrist. The guy even tried to pull back and dodge, and it didn’t work. Muscles tightened on both their arms, but the wrist stayed exactly where it was.
“The young ladies are not to be touched,” Ray informed the thug, his English accent thicker than ever. Please don’t let me be blushing, and please don’t let Ray get us killed. Two fights in one day were enough. I was unarmed and didn’t have the stamina for a third!
The guy’s muscles relaxed, and so did Ray’s. He grinned. Criminy, he had sharp teeth, an irregular hacksaw set that made Sharky look tame. He straightened up, and Ray let go so he could pull his hand back. “Well, you’re sure the real Reviled. Okay, you win. They’re The Inscrutable Machine.” Digging a hand into his pocket, he pulled out a rolled-up stack of bills and tossed them across the room, where Lucyfar caught them effortlessly.
“Kids, meet Chimera,” Lucyfar introduced as she counted off the bills.
“Chimera’s dead,” I blurted out like an idiot. Well, he was! And this guy was too young to be the original, even if somehow he’d survived.
“Not even Chimera Junior, Chimera Two, anything? Someone’s going to get real, real mad you took that name,” Claire echoed, just as disbelieving.
“Evolution missed a piece. You still had the hydra’s powers,” Ray said in a much quieter voice.
Chimera didn’t answer immediately. Ray had nailed it. Barely remembered antiquated TV footage wasn’t much to go by, but this guy had the right look. It had been years. Lots and lots of years. But then, Evolution hadn’t left much to regenerate.
Chimera finally laughed. “You kids are way too sharp. I’m glad to meet you already. Sit down, make yourselves at home. We’re not formal here. This is just the place we hang out.”
Ray looked around at all the brown. “I would have expected a bar. I suppose that just shows off how new I am to this.”
Lucyfar giggled, a little too hysterically for my tastes. Chimera gave his head an amused shake. “Yep, you are, but not for the reason you think. The only drinks here are for Cy.” As he explained, the half-sized brown refrigerator the brown lamp sat on opened up and a brown beer bottle floated out, sitting atop a black knife. The knife flipped, tossing the bottle over to Chimera, who caught it in one hand—a hand that red and blac
k scales flickered across as his arm swung.
He held the bottle out to Ray. “Have a drink if you want, but it won’t do you any good. If you’ve got a physical power, forget getting drunk or high. Super metabolism.”
Ray took the bottle and flicked the metal cap off with his thumb curiously while Lucyfar added, “And I’m pretty sure E-Claire’s out of luck as well.” Ray passed the bottle over to Claire automatically. She gave it a sniff, and wordlessly handed it back to me. I sniffed too. Yuck, smelled way too much like coffee.
I held the bottle back out to Chimera. “I don’t think we’ll be putting underage drinking laws on our crime spree.”
“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” the guy on the couch offered immediately. That left me to step away from my friends and hand it to him. I could tell he was a mad scientist automatically. I’d never seen a coat with so many pockets, in rows down the front and all of them bulging. Plus, he had leather goggles pushed up on his head. They were clearly a badge of office.
I had to make me a pair. Could I get away with wearing them when not in costume? I totally could; my dad was Brian Akk. People would think it was a father/daughter thing.
Without them, I got this skeptical stare from the couch guy. As he tilted back the bottle to take a pull from it, Lucyfar said, “Bad Penny, this is Cybermancer. Cybermancer, Bad Penny. You may feel free to commiserate about your supervillain names.”
I did wince. I knew it was coming, but… “It’s been like two hours. Am I Bad Penny already?”
“I don’t know. Are you? How does that lightning attack work? It didn’t hurt Ifrit, but it sure threw him off balance,” Cybermancer questioned me.
Lucyfar broke in again. “Why would I bring Reviled and E-Claire, but a ringer for Bad Penny?”
“Princess of Lies, remember?” Cybermancer shot back. Lucyfar pressed her hand to her chest and gave him a wounded look. It was all fun and games between them, but, when his eyes turned back to me, they weren’t convinced. He was waiting for an answer.
An answer I didn’t have. “It glues you to the next thing you touch. I stuck his foot to the floor,” I hedged.
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