“Hey,” she said. “Little Miss Sunshine can’t go watery on me.”
I sniffed and wiped my eyes. “And fiends of the night shouldn’t be up past their bedtimes. You still haven’t told me where you’ve been.”
She’d disappeared right after the public funeral for Atlas, Nimbus, and Ajax. All Blackstone would tell anybody was that she’d been “helping the DSA with an investigation,” and although she’d texted a few times she hadn’t spilled any details.
And she’d stayed strictly nocturnal since getting back two weeks ago. We hadn’t resumed our weekly outings to The Fortress, and we hadn’t really talked. About anything. I’d thought she’d been avoiding me. Which I could understand, since I had almost gotten her killed.
She read my face. “Hey. You didn’t drag me along—I volunteered, remember? Hell, I owed the Anarchist big-time. If that meant going into a daylight fight, my biggest problem with the way it turned out is I didn’t get a chance to shoot anybody. Not even a little.”
That surprised a laugh out of me.
“Better,” she said. “Want me to shoot a few newsies for you? Just a little?”
“Aagh.” I clutched my hair, sliding down in my chair. “Just a little. You’d think they’d leave me alone.”
“In what bizarro alternate world would they do that? After the Burnout scandal with all those underage ‘sidekicks’ last year? And we’re talking about Atlas, the Great American Hero? You can’t just show your birth-certificate, so the tabloids can claim you’re jailbait, and you’ve got to admit that the ten-year age difference between the two of you made it look a bit squicky.”
“Nine! Nine years! And I thought you were all for it.”
“I was. When you’re in The Life you carpe the diem when you can. I didn’t know Atlas well, but Blackstone didn’t even blink at the thought of you two. Chakra wouldn’t have cared if one of you was a duck, but if Blackstone had thought it the least hinky he’d have warned you away from it.”
“Then what did I do wrong?”
“Disappearing with Atlas for three days? With his rep? You’d have done better to run off to Vegas. Getting married by Elvis would have been nothing.”
“We were engaged, and nothing happened!”
“Great title for your autobiography. Nobody’ll buy it.”
I moaned.
“This conversation is undoing my therapy.”
“Really? You killed how many Bad Guys in LA, got tortured by a sadistic nut-job and waxed him too, and this is what you talk to Dr. Mendell about?”
“I don’t talk to her about LA. Or Reno. Not since she certified me for duty.”
“Coffee’s ready.”
She got up and poured, then did something arcane with the cans and packets she’d brought. English cream. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Other stuff. She never asked what I wanted, but I always wanted what she made.
“So what were you doing Blackstone wouldn’t talk about?” I asked, blowing on mine. Habit: I could have drunk it boiling.
For a moment she looked really, really dangerous, like an evil Snow White.
“Let’s just say the ‘vampire’ population of New Orleans has declined. On that note, good news: I’m not contagious.”
“You can’t make other vampires?”
“Nope. Not without psycho-Vlad to empower me, anyway. And since he’s ashes floating in Lake Michigan…”
Her smile stretched ear to ear, and I sighed, relieved. I’d occasionally worried that the Department of Superhuman Affairs would conspire with the Center for Disease Control to lock her up as the potential vector for a vampire-plague. After all that’s what her maker had planned. I sipped the coffee and settled back with a deeper, blissful sigh.
“But the whole Atlas-scandal has been going on awhile,” Artemis said. “Why is Shelly worried now?”
So I told her.
* * *
“Are you brain-dead?”
I’d only ever seen Artemis this mad once, the night I’d tracked her down in her hideout under her old family home. She’d shot me in the eye to make the point. It had stung
“Blackstone is going to get pureed and you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m sorry!”
I forced my hands down, wrapping them around my cup. A mistake; I squeezed too hard and it shattered, splashing coffee across the kitchen. Déjà-vu. I leaped up and grabbed a dish towel.
“I told you, Shelly and I thought we could find his killer first!”
“Of all the blonde— Look, you can’t just catch the guy who’s going to do it! You said the police think this guy’s a contract killer! You catch this guy, whoever would have paid for the hit is just going to hire somebody else! So Blackstone doesn’t end up in a box—he’ll still be dead!”
“Oh.”
I dropped the towel and sat on the floor, felt a crunch. “Dammit!” Reaching under me I pulled pieces of cup out of the seat of my shorts, stuck my finger in the hole. I tried to laugh, and realized I was shaking.
“Hope,” Artemis said, but I couldn’t stop.
No no no no.
“Hope!”
Minuteman. Killed by a gang-banger. Impact. Died in Israel. Ajax. Nimbus. Atlas. All gone down together in LA. Now Blackstone.
“Shit!” Artemis isn’t nearly as strong as me, but she took an iron grip on my chin and pulled my head around.
“Look into my freaking eyes!”
And I fell into cool pools of blue.
“Better?” She pulled back and I nodded limply, the screaming panic only an echo, back to the shadow of fear of the past few days.
“That’s amazing.”
“It’s a benefit past donors get. Panic attacks? You need a better therapist.”
I opened my hand and ground bits of coffee cup dribbled down to the floor.
“Or I could grind your beans myself,” I giggled wetly.
She relaxed. “Done?”
I thought about it, and nodded.
“Good.” She pulled me to my feet and kicked a chair under me, the big-sister again.
But she still looked dark and dangerous, waiting for a target. It was like having a dragon sitting in my kitchen.
“And I’m sorry,” she said. “Your idea is a good one—it’s just not big enough.”
“It’s not?”
“Not even close. Look, this isn’t your kind of job. I’m Blackstone’s apprentice; threat-analysis is what we do. Just to be clear, all you’ve got is that, in the timeline before the Big One changed everything, this banker was killed? And later Blackstone, both by the same method?”
I nodded again.
“And no discovered connection between them?”
“No.”
“So there are four possibilities.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “It’s completely personal; the killer’s an Outfit hitter; he’s an independent contractor to the Outfit; or he’s an independent contracted by someone else. If it’s the first, great; we catch him and we save Blackstone. If it’s the second, we catch him we might be able to tie him to the Outfit and save Blackstone. If it’s the third or the fourth, the Outfit, or whoever else is going to hire him, will just get someone else. You follow?”
“But—”
“So we have to find the killer, you bet. But we don’t assume it ends there. Not by a long ways.”
She made some calls—one of them to Seven, sketching the problem and ordering him to climb inside Blackstone’s tux and stick close until the danger was past. His superhuman luck would have to protect the both of them. Then she went to bed. The windowless basement was perfect (I realized I’d been tense the entire time she’d been upstairs), and Artemis had explored the racks and piles of camping gear and made a nice little nook before I’d woken up. She threw herself down on an open cot, and looked up at me.
“Take the light bulb with you?”
“Okay.” I unscrewed the single bare bulb that lit the cellar and went upstairs, softly closing the door.
Chapter Ten
The Wall Street Journal
* * *
I thawed and cooked up a breakfast of hash browns, pancakes and syrup, and reconstituted and seasoned eggs to keep my hands busy, then wandered the little valley like I’d planned. I found the doe and her fawn, and around noon I called Shelly and asked her to commit a serious felony for me. Sunset painted the sky with spilled oranges and violets, and, knowing what to listen for, I heard the drone when it returned to circle high above the cabin. When Artemis came back upstairs I was changed and ready to go. Before she could ask, I hugged her.
“Thanks Jacky,” I said. “Fly safe? I’m going back to LA.”
She smiled a predator’s smile. “Don’t do anything I would do.”
I flew to catch the sunset, hitting the coast as the last rays faded over water, and stopped first at Restormel, where their Willis waited for me with a stuffed book-bag and an improbably bored look. One of Platoon’s duplicates, Restormel’s Willis knew me as well as our Willis did, and had been happy to pull everything together for me no questions asked—not that there’d been anything illegal about this part of it. After I changed back into civvies, he brought a car around. An old sedan, it looked like it belonged where we were going, but it was probably armored and tech-pimped in every possible way.
Shelly had found me an address, a name, and, hacking the LAPD database, an arrest file. I tied my hair up while Bob drove, put on the baseball cap and sunglasses he’d stuffed in the bag on top of the money, and went over my notes. He parked us in front of an old apartment tower, one of the survivors of the quake. Nine Ninety-Nine Cypress Road.
“Thanks Willis. I shouldn’t be long.”
He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Good. I’d hate to get ticketed while we’re in there.”
“Can’t you stay with the car?”
“It’ll tell me if anybody tries to mess with it. I’m more concerned someone will try and mess with you and you’ll have to go all Astra on them.”
I looked out the window. Half the streetlights were dark, and probably had been before the quake. Boards still covered a lot of storefront windows, and the few pedestrians on the street hurried, on their way somewhere else. The address next to the tower was an empty lot, like a missing tooth, with a clap-board construction wall around the cleared space. If I wasn’t what I was, there was no way I’d get out of the car. Willis looked… prohibitive. Plain dark suit, short dark hair, narrow face. A face that said I’m a nice guy. Don’t mess with me, and I’ll stay nice. I was back in cargo shorts and cotton cami; together we’d look like a child-star and her bodyguard, but at least random strangers with evil intentions would be cautious.
I sighed and nodded, then bit on a nasty thought.
“Willis? Blackstone told me you’ve got duplicates everywhere. CIA, NSA, DSA. What will they say about tonight?”
He smiled. “Nothing. My right hand never talks about what my left hand is doing, unless the bodies begin piling up.”
“That’s…okay then.” I shivered and hoped he wasn’t being literal.
We got out and went in. Shelly had found the place by hacking Orb’s agency computer and going over her bank statements. The apartment, far from her own home and unconnected to her business, practically jumped up and down and whistled look at me! A raid on the apartment management’s files found several resident complaints about the occupant, a Rafael Jones; apparently he liked to get high and play really loud concert music—Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony being his favorite—at wall-rattling decibels. The mug-shot from the police report on one of the public disturbance arrests belonged to our Dr. Cornelius.
The old elevator took us to the top floor, where he lived in apartment 909. Uhuh.
Shelly had done some research based on the numbers and what he’d said at Lunette’s. In hermetic magical theory the ninth decan, Kurtael, was the decan of death, decay, fear, and disorder, personified by a corpse in armor, a black horse, and a skeletal, black-cloaked figure.
The door was painted black, and I smelled myrrh. Willis snorted, unimpressed.
I took a deep breath. I was best-friends with a vampire, for goodness sake.
Then somebody inside screamed. Willis swore and suddenly had a gun. I dropped the bag, grabbed the doorknob, and pushed. The doorframe broke with a sharp snap.
The small apartment was way too crowded.
Mr. Jones hung suspended in the grip of a guy in a suit who looked like carved obsidian. Two obvious minions flanked him, one with a hand full of Orb’s hair, gun to her face, as I came through the door. She looked more mad than scared.
“Drop him!” Willis shouted behind me. Amazingly, obsidian-guy did.
“Shelly?” I whispered, and just like that she was there through my earbug.
“Wow! Blacktop,” she said. “A-class Ajax type, suspected transformer. General warrant issued.”
General warrant—open arrest warrant, extremely dangerous, need not be brought in alive. I froze, but only for a second. Last year Ajax had spent three months training me to fight; it had been like stepping into a fight-club ring every day, and he’d taught me just how much I could take and still give it back. Atlas had taught me the tactical side.
Dangerous subject, hostile, engaged, surrounded by potential victims? Remove to safer surroundings.
Open palmed, I launched myself at Blacktop’s center of mass and kept going. Jones’ apartment overlooked the empty lot, and his window didn’t even slow us down. I put speed into it so we hit the ground before the bits of window and frame did.
He kicked me on the bounce, skidding me across the lot before I got control. I came back in under a swing that could splatter a normal person into dis-jointed bits and red mist. Obsidian-guy might look brittle, but he wasn’t; it was like punching solid rock. His second swing caught me and threw me, stunned, into the apartment building wall.
“Hope, he’s high A-class! You’re stronger, but he’s tougher!”
“You think?” I shook my head, ignoring the gunshots above me, and pulled myself out of the wall. Somehow my cap had stayed on, but my sunglasses were in little bits somewhere and my top was getting holy.
Maybe I couldn’t hurt him, but under his messed-up suit Mr. Statue was cut like Mr. Universe, all overdeveloped muscle. I hoped he was as inflexible.
I dusted myself off. Be confident. “Give up?”
He looked up at the hole we’d made coming out. There were no more gunshots.
“To a little girl like you?” He sounded like a soft-spoken avalanche.
“Under the teeniness I’m Astra. Give up?”
“And bow to the princess? Naw. General warrant—I go into the Block I’m not coming out.”
I launched myself again, and this time I jinxed for the swing. When it whistled by I grabbed his shoulder and flipped behind him, dropped, reached around past his pits, pulled up, and squeezed. With his huge pecks, there was no way to lock my hands behind his neck, but strong as I was I didn’t have to. The hold forced his arms up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and took us up as he squirmed.
The street dropped away as he tried to claw at me, but in my hold he could only reach back over his head—and his bulging muscles didn’t let him reach far enough to even touch me. His feet kicked uselessly. He tried to curl up and my
arms burned with the strain, but I kept the hold as we climbed.
“Bitch!” he spat, all coolness gone as the ground dropped away.
And then he screamed. A film of inky shadow poured out of the night and wrapped around him like a living thing, freezing wherever it touched. Then it was gone and he hung in my arms.
Villains Inc. (Wearing the Cape) Page 7