Heroine Addiction

by Matarese, Jennifer

  I tighten the belt of my robe around my waist and throw open the door to the bathroom.

  Hazel's backed away from Nate, her brow furrowed in confusion as he hoots and hollers with no consideration for the little girl napping on my couch. Troy, meanwhile, is slumped onto the floor next to the couch, not moving.

  I ignore the others and go to him first, and my breath hitches when I get closer and see his fingers pretzeled at unnatural angles.

  It doesn't make any sense, and makes a boatload of sense all at the same time.

  I've seen what the remote watchers at the SLB can do when their rules and regulations are broken. Off somewhere even my vaunted all-powerful father can't mentally locate is what I've always imagined to be a small windowless room full of people too powerful to be heroes but not ambitious enough for common criminal villainny. They sit in their drab little cubicles and watch the whole damn lot of us, boring themselves into an early grave witnessing our check-balancing and laundry sorting.

  Every so often they catch us in a crime, spot us using whatever phenomenal cosmic power they possess as we rescue without a license or wield our powers with reckless endangerment outside of our current security level.

  Sometimes you receive a ticket in the mail. Sometimes you collapse in agony in someone else's living room, swimming back to consciousness to find your arm broken or a warning tattoo etched into your arm.

  And sometimes … well, sometimes the outcome is so much worse.

  I reach out to touch him out of instinct, but pull away when I notice the odd angle of his neck.

  “Troy, wake up,” I order.

  He doesn't move. His eyes, glassy and hollow, stay fixed and open in their sockets.

  “Troy?” I ask. My voice cracks like punched glass.

  A torn piece of notebook paper lies on the floor next to him. Hazel mutters a low curse under her breath as I pick it up and read the words hastily scribbled onto it.

  I nearly drop the paper at the simple brief sentence.

  Vera and Nate return to their own bodies right now.

  The period nearly presses a hole through the lined paper. The eerily bright green ink of the circle spreads outward, the point of the pen apparently shoved down on the paper with excessive force.

  He'd pushed his will into his words, and he'd wanted.

  “I didn't know the Scribbler had a son,” I hear myself say.

  “He didn't.”

  I teleport in place out of ingrained reflex, reappearing in a standing position facing the unfamiliar speaker rather than struggling to my feet from my awkward crouch. Now it's Nate's turn to curse, a crass gesture I don't blame him for. Once I see the uniforms on the three men who've materialized in my living room, even I'm tempted to let loose with an impressive string of uncharacteristic slurs.

  “Mr. Lampwick was not the son of the Scribbler,” one of the men says in an official tone of voice. His navy blue SLB-issued uniform sports a label which declares in dark red lettering that his name is Dr. Morioka, and through the dull fog in my mind I immediately know why he's there. He's a doctor. Doctors retrieve the bodies. “The Scribbler doesn't have any family,” Dr. Morioka continues. “Mr. Lampwick's powers being similar to his was merely a coincidence.”

  Listening to him talk about Troy in the past tense forces bile to rise in my throat. “You didn't have to kill him,” I murmur. My voice doesn't seem to want to rise in volume, and my throat suddenly feels like it's been sandblasted.

  Dr. Morioka's smile is gentle but firm. “There are laws, Miss Noble. And Mr. Lampwick understood them when he agreed not to use his powers.”

  “He uses his powers all the time,” I snap. “All he does all day is sit in my cafe and write.”

  “Have you ever actually looked at what he wrote?”

  I pause, unable to answer one way or another. Troy said they were stories, but he never let me read them.

  Dr. Morioka takes advantage of my sudden silence to rest his hands on my shoulders and calmly move me aside. I faintly recognize Hazel's angry “Hey!” which I can only presume is due to me being treated like an obtrusive piece of furniture. But I don't protest, not even when the other two men unfurl a body bag and lay it out on the living room floor next to Troy.

  I know better, after all. Troy merely used his powers and they killed him. I don't want to imagine what terrible fate will befall me if I start an argument with them.

  “What was he writing?”

  Dr. Morioka stops directing the other two men through binding Troy's limp fingers together, which I guess is meant to keep him from accidentally scratching a story into the sturdy plastic body bag. “Pardon?”

  “Troy,” I say, and his name croaks out of me. “What was he writing?”

  “Oh, that.” Dr. Morioka waves a dismissive hand in the air. “Grocery lists, mostly. Nothing that caused any serious damage.”

  Nate's fists clench at his sides when he finally pipes up. I silently pray that he doesn't decide to throw a punch, although a morbid part of me wonders what they'd have to do to take out Nate for good measure. “Now how in the hell does returning Vera and me to our own bodies fall under serious damage?”

  Dr. Morioka's professionally polite facade slips a tad before he firms up his smile again. “Mr. Lampwick's subsidy did not allow for emergency situations. Nor did it allow for him to use his abilities in cases when there were already heroes available to solve the issue at hand. Now, if you'll excuse us, we must transport the body to the morgue before rigor mortis sets in to ensure he doesn't permanently gesture something dangerous in sign language. We'll return to complete the clean-up process shortly. Thank you for using the Superhero Licensing Board for your disposal needs.”

  “Wait –”

  A blink of my eyes later, the three men and Troy's bagged body are gone. I'm impressed at their speed even for a teleporter. My head feels like I stuck it in a laundry dryer, a pounding headache growing behind my temples. The last few minutes swirl around me like a dizzying tornado. My stomach churns, and I wonder for a moment if my memorial to Troy will be me heaving my guts into my toilet for the next half-hour.

  Dead. Troy is dead.

  Oh, Lord, I really am going to throw up.

  Heavy hands weigh down on my shoulders, and it takes me a moment to recognize Nate's smooth palms on my skin. It's strange, how calming it is to know Nate is there, to hear Hazel sniffling in the kitchen. “Breathe, Vera.”

  I inhale, then exhale. I'd been holding my breath.

  “Again.”

  Inhale. Exhale.

  “Again.”

  “No, I'm good. I just –“ I bend my head and close my eyes. “I need a moment.”

  Nate leans close to whisper in my ear. “A moment's all you get, peaches. You know that, right?”

  Breathe, Vera. “I know.”

  I can't stand here forever. I can't even stand here for five minutes. My powers still simmer too low to use, and probably won't reach a good boil for a while. I can't hold off preparing to go into battle so I can stare at the floor and show respectful mourning for Troy's sacrifice.

  I have to go shower. I can go feel bad in the bathroom.

  If there's one thing I learned as a little girl at my mother's knee, it was how to compartmentalize during times of strife.

  “I can do that, too.”

  Nate and I both look up to see Sierra peering over the side of the couch at us, still tucked up under the blanket, her gamine brown eyes peeking out over the silk-bordered edge. “Swap people, I mean,” she says in her soft wee voice.

  “You can?” I ask.

  She nods as best she can with her head still down.

  There are reasons I don't want children. My patience only lasts so long, wearing thin more quickly than a two-dollar pair of pantyhose. My anger flares like sunbursts. I don't have a pet because I knew the first chewed-up shoe or pile of cat vomit will have me contemplating bringing it back to the store. Lord only knows how badly I'd react to filled diapers or regurgitate
d breast milk on my favorite dress.

  I stare at Sierra for a long moment, my expression deceptively serene, while a vicious voice in the back of my head hisses, Troy died because of you.

  When I finally believe I can speak without screaming, I sit on the couch next to her and ask, “Sweetie, did the man who took you ask you to do that?”

  She nods again. “He told me to swap people and then I could go back to my Aunt Melody again.”

  My breath hitches out of me at the name.

  I know an Aunt Melody with a child's crayon drawings taped up on her office walls, one who would be in a prime position for John to discover and covet and take.

  The morgue. He took the morgue director's niece.

  I get to my feet with a quick glance at Nate and Hazel, both of whom appear to be as angry and frustrated with the whole situation as I am. I could just go back to the bathroom, take my shower, style my hair and wind down until I'm not a bundle of frayed angry nerves anymore. It would do me good, I'll bet.

  But I can't. Not really. Not until I know where we stand.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I ask, almost as an afterthought.

  Nate speaks before Sierra can answer. “I've got her, peaches.”

  Sufficiently satisfied, I grab a trio of pens from the side table, twist my hair up and jam a pair of ballpoints through the bun. Then I huff out my breath, pulling off the pen cap of the last pen with my teeth.

  So much for my sabbatical. I've got a villain to defeat.

  23.

  It takes a while for my powers to return, which leaves us all waiting in a mournful silence. A quick shower and a hasty sweeping of my hair into a still-damp updo later, I duck into my bedroom to change into a black silk wiggle dress and a pair of black slingbacks. I suppose there are more sensible clothes to wear to a fight to the death, but I certainly won't find them in my closet.

  Quite frankly, this is as professional as I get.

  Instead of dwelling on Troy's demise, I focus on writing down everything I know about John Camden and his plans, whatever they might be in the long run, and what they appear to be in the now, while behind me a slow flurry of activity simmers. I zone out with such desperate fixation that I even manage to ignore the SLB disposal unit as they remove Troy's body and disinfect the living room so well you'd never guess someone just died there.

  Before long I'm drawn out of my numb reverie by the enticing scent of Chinese food.

  By the time I emerge from my concentrated daze, most of the Chinese food is long gone. Everyone else sits around the kitchen table, holding court over a small cluttered village of soy-stained cardboard containers and plastic tubs slick with leftover broth. Sierra pokes her sleepy way through a plate of chicken and broccoli, surprisingly eating more of the broccoli than the chicken. Nate digs through the quart of lobster lo mein in his hand, while Hazel occasionally pops a forkful of plain white rice into her mouth.

  Hazel pitches me a lukewarm egg roll that I catch in one-handed.

  “What did I miss?” I ask, right before taking a healthy bite of the egg roll. “Other than everyone ordering dinner during an emergency.”

  Nate shrugs. “A man's gotta eat, peaches,” he says. “Little girls do, too.”

  I glance over at Sierra, who chews a mouthful of broccoli as she pokes at the rest of her meal with a plastic fork. It strikes me that I never even asked if she was hungry, what she subsisted on in that little room in Morris's lair. Did he order her Chinese food or bring in burgers and fries? Or did he even care enough to supply her with something to eat?

  Nate clears his throat, and I jerk my gaze away from Sierra before she notices. He gets to his feet to move closer to me, his hand digging for something in the pocket of his jeans, and I narrow my eyes suspiciously as he approaches.

  “Got you a little something,” Nate says, his voice low. “Requested it from the SLB team while you were washing me right out of your hair, so to speak.”

  He slips me a small round plastic cylinder, so warm and lightweight in my palm I barely register it's there. I nearly give it a surreptitious glance to identify what he could possibly have given me, but his grip tightens around my wrist, a silent warning. “Now, don't go saying I never gave you nothing for Christmas,” he murmurs. “That's a good five Christmases right there, and more besides, so you better not be expecting any flatscreen TVs or anything from me.”

  It takes me a moment to realize what he must have handed me. My wide eyes lock onto the syringe inside the cylinder. Immortal blood is potent and diligent, a precious commodity. The price of immortal blood is high. A few drops will cure your cancer or fix your bones.

  Immortals can't simply dispense blood like walking kegs of magical healing juice. They have just as much bodily autonomy as the next jerk off the street, but preserving that right means regulating their use of that blood in return. I've never met an immortal who argued against the laws the SLB helped establish to keep them safe, to prevent them from being used as lab rats.

  They're allowed the occasional lapse, though. When I say “occasional,” I don't mean every few months or so. Most immortals go for centuries without donating to another person. As far as I know, Nate's never shared his blood with anyone.

  “I thought you were only allowed one,” I whisper.

  His expression is light and yet inscrutable. I feel as though I'm trying to watch a play behind his eyes, but the curtains are firmly shut. “I asked if I could use it on Troy,” he says. “They declined. Said the little bastard had a DNR.”

  I smile wryly. For normal people, a DNR requests no resuscitation in a medical emergency. For heroes, it means no raising us from the dead, no matter what the circumstances of our untimely demise. As much as I wish they would have allowed Nate to donate his blood to Troy, we both understand why he would choose death over a quickie resurrection.

  “They let me have it anyway, though,” Nate says. He keeps his voice low, and I wonder if he genuinely thinks Hazel might want her own vial of immortal blood. I doubted it. Hazel would probably donate it to a children's cancer ward or something. “That lady in charge checked with the powers that be in the precognition department, and the next thing I know they're jabbing a needle in my arm and telling me it's mine to do as I see fit.”

  “I can't take this,” I say, trying to push it back into his hand but failing as he deftly escapes me. “Nate, this is too much.”

  “No, it ain't. It's just enough.”

  “Just enough for what?”

  He grimaces, a quick flash of guilt shadowing his eyes before it clears away like a thinned fog in a stiff breeze. “Aw, hell, Vera, you know exactly what it's for. You just ain't all that keen on saying it out loud.”

  “Apparently neither are you,” I tease.

  We look at each other then, clear and steady, and we both smile as one.

  I sigh, though, as I slip the cylinder in the only safe place I have to stash anything in a dress this tight, tucking it into my cleavage without shame. “I don't think it'll come to that,” I say. It's more of a hope than a thought, really. I've already died once today. Twice just might be pushing my luck.

  Nate's smile is wry and a bit sad, and he reaches out to cup my cheek. His thumb skims a quick blink-and-you-miss-it path over my lips, and the pad comes away reddened with Cherry Jubilee lipstick rather than the hint of his blood that stained them only a few short hours ago. “It already has come to that, hasn't it?” he says. “If he ain't above killing Morris Kemp, I doubt he'll stop at little old you.”

  I hesitate to point out that it'll be awfully difficult for me to inject myself with his blood if I'm dead, but I imagine it's labeled nice and neat, a blatant warning to anyone who finds my bloated corpse this time around. If found, poke with this.

  I giggle in spite of myself, saucy and wicked.

  “So what next?” Hazel murmurs. She stares in curiosity at me as she absently stirs her rice around the plate.

  “I take Sierra back to her aunt.” The li
ttle girl perks up at that, and I flash her a comforting smile. “After that … we'll see.”

  “So you're going in without a plan, then?”

  I can't help but laugh at Nate's question. “Is there any other way?” Summoning up my steadily growing courage, I clear my throat and call over his shoulder. “Sierra, you want to go home?”

  Sierra's eyes widen, the fork falling out of her hand, and her smile brightens the room like the sun coming out after a hurricane. “Really?”

  I nod, and she practically bolts from the chair so fast it nearly tumbles to the floor.

  Her hand tucks into mine, tugging at me as she tries to lead me towards the front door I don't need to use. I shoot Nate a concerned look. I could ask him to come with me, I suppose, but this whole mess has already done enough damage to his life. I'd hate to think just how much more complicated things could become. With everything snowballing into more and more disastrous territory with every passing hour, the more people I involve, the more sloppy things will become for me and mine in the long run. “You staying here?”

  Nate spots my train of thought the same way he always used to. “Don't you worry,” he says. “I'll hold down the fort but good on this end.”

  Behind him, Hazel finishes off her white rice, surreptitiously giving us a concerned glance.

  It makes me feel better than I should, that Nate's staying behind. But it does leave me without backup, an unsettling thought which spawns an irritating idea.

  Tightening my grip on Sierra's small hand, I ask, “You ready to go?”

  She beams up at me and pulls at my arm again, drawing me towards the only exit she knows.

  Before I can question the relative intelligence of recruiting the closest thing I have to an ally in this whole affair, I teleport to my brother's apartment.

  I land with Sierra in the cluttered hallway of an eternally trendy loft apartment complex I haven't visited in years. If the scattered contents of the hall are any indication, Graham's home hasn't changed much. It's still a cheerful enclave for starry-eyed young artists splitting precious rent control and the sort of married Lord and Cape graduates who dress their kindergartner in festive autumn knits before walking them to their first day of school at the Superkids Fly High Day School around the block. Lord only knows how Graham ever landed a spot in the building, or why a confirmed bachelor and unapologetic jock would have even kept it.