Heroine Addiction

by Matarese, Jennifer

  “Where did you come up with that pile of garbage?” Graham scoffs.

  I shrug. “Possibly because he also got her to swap me with Nate, quite frankly.”

  I probably should have mentioned that particular fact about me and Nate earlier, if the grim set of Graham's mouth is any indication. “You got what?”

  I wave off his concern, since I highly doubt it's concern so much as frustration that's bothering him. I don't think it's occurred to him that my brief reassignment into Nate's body might have been hazardous to my health in more ways than one, any more than it has that our bodyswap isn't all some complicated example of just how out of the loop he is at any given time. “And besides,” I say, trying to bring the conversation back to the more important issues, “I've been out of touch with everybody for five years now. How do you expect me to know who to trust? Right now we can't even trust our own father. Why should I trust you, Daddy?”

  Graham grimaces and releases his grip on me when I say that. “I can't make much of an argument against that one,” he mutters.

  I can't help but sigh at his reaction. “You know, normal people would point out I should be able to trust my own damn family.”

  Dr. Hale lets out a disbelieving laugh at that, drawing our attention. “You don't know a lot of normal people, I'm guessing.”

  “She isn't related to many, either.”

  All eyes turn to the door to the office, where my mother and father stand.

  Mom in her body and Dad in John Camden's, technically, but still.

  Looking at him right now may as well be a smack upside the head that I should have noticed. My father and John share a few traits in common. They're both serious and stoic when in public, but Dad allows himself to shed a bit of that regal austerity when no one's pointing a news camera at him, when it's just our family and no one else. John never stands down, or at least he's never done so outside of the lonely confines of his basement apartment in the Rafters.

  The hesitant but warm expression on John Camden's face is so jarringly foreign I feel like an obtuse moron for not noticing it sooner.

  I may not get along with my parents, but I'm still a daddy's girl. Dad may not have been the sort to dispense hugs and kisses like candy and money, but he never suggested carrot sticks over churros and diverted my mother's attentions when she waved another filmy designer monstrosity in front of me. He covered for me when I skipped out on my fourteenth birthday party to take a breather in the library at Trinity College with a cheap Regency romance and a smuggled banana nut muffin.

  It doesn't matter that he's not in the right body.

  I'm just suddenly, blindly reminded just how much I missed him.

  A moment later I'm hugging him tightly, unable to pull away.

  “I'm really mad at you,” I say, unnerved by the way he doesn't even smell like pipe smoke and cologne the way he should.

  “I'm mad at you, too,” he murmurs.

  He says it into my hair before brushing foreign lips across my forehead, but the words sink in just the same.

  Mom hovers outside of our little familial conclave, makes herself small and insignificant simply by her pointed silence. When Dad finally releases me from the embrace of scrawny unfamiliar arms, her existence suddenly swims around me like a simmering pool of lava, intense and heated, inflaming my barely established calm.

  “Where's John?” I snap, my words bitten off in jagged shards.

  She doesn't flinch from my harsh tone of voice, but the slight narrowing of her eyes indicates I've struck a nerve. “Hell if I know,” she snaps back. “One minute he was standing right in front of me and the next he was gone. He's obviously figured out how to unlock at least part of your father's mental toybox.”

  “You seriously expect me to believe you?”

  Mom stiffens. “You may have been too busy being bouncing around the place to notice, but it's not as simple and clear-cut as you seem to think everything is.”

  “You protected him,” I say. There's a difference between just recognizing it in the back of my mind and actually saying it out loud, putting it out there and letting the dealer call the hand what it is.

  “Of course I protected him! He was in Everett. Hell, he still is. Would you prefer I allow him to traipse around in your father's body with no care for the consequences of his actions?”

  “And you didn't try to swap them back?”

  “How? I was too close to the situation. John would have seen me coming a mile away. You, on the other hand …” She crosses her arms, a petulant display for someone creeping daintily around fifty years old. “That plastic surgery machine of Morris's comes in handy, that's all I have to say.”

  Well, that certainly explains where the extra Morris came from. “That was you?”

  “Yes, it was me.”

  “How did you even get access to Morris's plastic surgery machine?”

  “Oh, it's not as though anybody was in their apartment to stop me,” she says.

  I frown. “Mom, you didn't have to do that.”

  “I had to get you to come to the city somehow.”

  “It's called a phone,” I say, growing more exasperated with every passing second.

  She cocks an eyebrow at that. “Oh, you know what one is? Because you haven't made much use of one for the past five years, have you?”

  Oh, not this argument again. “You know, I would have listened to you without the plastic surgery machine. You didn't have to make yourself look like Morris.”

  “He's the only one you talk to, isn't he?”

  Even Graham groans at the betrayed jealousy threading through her words. It's nothing new for either one of us to deal with, unfortunately.

  “Oh, for heaven's sake, Mom,” I mutter.

  “I didn't know any better until I finally got in touch with your father,” she says. It must be sinking in, the aggravated looks on her children's faces, Dad's tired eyes and the way Dr. Hale is trying desperately not to rubberneck, because Mom's voice softens to a more respectable level as she goes on. “John wouldn't have let me get away with getting in touch with you as myself, and it's a miracle I kept my visit to you as Morris a secret as long as I did. If I hadn't come, it wouldn't have mattered if your father upended the family all over again or that Morris was dead. You wouldn't have returned otherwise, and you were the only hope we had.”

  I'm stunned into silence with that particular admission. It's a compliment whether Mom likes it or not, that when things went south they saved me for last rather than not thinking of me at all. They could have easily left me to lunch specials and caramel lattes, that boring everyday life they imagine I have with its pedestrian problems and decided lack of radioactive exposure or evil robots. The fact that they still consider me a hero, even in the singular blunt way you usually find hidden behind a glass pane you break in case of emergency, is a sign of a higher level of respect than I would have expected out of any of them, especially my mother.

  “What about me?” Graham asks.

  Mom shoots him a pointed look. “Your sister doesn't have a small child to worry about.”

  He pales, and his voice cracks when he asks, “You knew about Sam?”

  Mom's laugh grates, a harsh bruised sound. “Please, Graham. I know you don't think much of me, but I'm not completely without a brain.”

  My blood chills at the thought of my mother sitting at her desk with her perfect posture and glossy brown hair, occasionally peering out of her office door at my temperamental brother and thinking of his tiny son and reminding herself just what's at stake if she makes the wrong move around John. I don't envy her a bit.

  “Can you all please stop arguing?”

  All eyes turn to Dad, all three of us stunned to hear him speak up. Dad's normally not one to engage in the sort of histrionics the rest of us can't help but slip into on occasion, so hearing his voice raised – even if it isn't precisely his at the moment – makes it the sort of rarity that demands respect.

  He glares at us all. �
��We're a family, damn it. We can save this for Christmas.”

  For a moment we all go silent. I suppose with any other family we might be having a good laugh at that one, but we haven't spent a Christmas together since before I left the city, before my parents' marriage fell apart, somewhere in between the Christmas where the potent insanity gas infected the water supply and the Christmas where the enormous tsunami took out the eastern end of the shopping district.

  We could easily be the sort of family who bicker over ham and mashed potatoes if we could ever manage to get to the dinner table in the first place.

  “So what now?”

  Graham's question hangs in the air. It's a good one, judging from the looks on everyone's faces. I'm not the only one who stormed into this situation blind, it seems, the four of us exchanging awkward glances as we mentally dance around what we know and don't know. We'll come up with something eventually, of course –

  “Sierra can swap them back.”

  … or Dr. Hale will do it for us. Either or, I suppose.

  She crouches beside Sierra and murmurs the question I'd sure as hell like to know, if she's even ready to try another swap after everything that's happened to her. She's almost free to go home and sleep curled up toasty and warm in her own bed. As much as all of us would be a lot better off if she'd swap Dad and John back to their respective bodies, a discomforting tension settles at the back of my neck. I wonder for a moment if we're using her just as surely as John did, with only the setting and the status of the door lock changed.

  I'm not as consoled as I'd like when she nods solemnly.

  Mom doesn't seem to be quite as bothered. “I'll call John and convince him to come here so he'll be on his way,” she says, reaching into the utility belt of her skintight green and gold costume for her cell phone.

  “He doesn't need to be here to get swapped.” Dr. Hale shoots me a sideways look, a silent understanding. She wants this over just as much as I do, I'll wager. “Sierra's stronger than she looks.”

  Her hands rest on Sierra's shoulders, an encouraging gesture, but it's hard not to focus on how very little she is.

  Mom considers that for a moment, studies Sierra with calculating eyes before saying, “He'll have to be here anyway.” Her gaze drifts Dad's way, looking for all of the world like the legendary superhero she's always been. “We're going to need you here in mind and body for this.”

  The two of them share an inscrutable look, a thousand silent conversations occurring that not even Graham or I can decipher. Dad stands there, reedy and pale and balding, barely filling out someone else's department-store suit, baggy-eyed and exhausted under flickering fluorescent lights, but when he throws a familiar smile my mother's way it's hard to see the rest of it. “Don't worry, Ivy,” he says. “Wherever I am, I'll get here.”

  “It's just John,” I can't help but blurt out.

  I feel like a fool for doing so, after everything that's happened. No one is ever 'just' someone to a superhero, former or otherwise. A hero can lose their way and take over an international space station in order to manipulate the SLB into providing his dying wife with immortal blood for a cancer treatment. A charity worker can get frustrated with the system and steal alien gold from the Intergalactic History Museum to fund her soup kitchen. A civilian's innocuous talent can twist and darken and tear apart the world with the right motivation. If there's one thing we learn our very first semester at Lord and Cape, it's how stereotyping can turn around and bite you right in the hind parts.

  Still, it's John Camden, of all people.

  Mom's lips tug into a wry frown. ”Vera, if you've learned anything the past few days, it should be never to underestimate that man.”

  She turns to make her call, cupping her hand around it to keep us from being overheard. It gives me a moment to notice Dad's attention, drawn away from all of us in Dr. Hale's office to the sweet siren call of the morgue hallway. It shouldn't look like a lure, not to anyone in the right frame of mind, but Dad's got something here most people don't, and it makes it difficult to conceal his quiet pining.

  I move up beside him, keeping my voice low. “Dad?”

  He clears his throat, startled out of his reverie. “Are we ready?”

  “He's in the fifth cell on the right.”

  His cheeks flush. “That wasn't what I was looking for.”

  I cross my arms and flash him a steady look that brooks none of his lies, not even a little white one like this.

  “Vera,” he chokes out. I'm terrified for a second that he's about to cry. “There's so many things I've wanted to say to you in the past five years –“

  “Dad, if you're honestly going to tell me that me coming out of the closet as a teenager helped inspire you to leave Mom for a notorious male supervillain, I'll leave you all here and go home to have waffles with my ex-girlfriend instead.”

  I don't mean to say it, but once it's out, it's out.

  His breath hitches before he gives me a sharp nod. “Right, then. We'll just have that talk later.”

  We won't, but I'm certainly not going to tell him that now.

  Mom finishes with her phone call, sweetly requesting that John come down to the SLB morgue so that she can give him a little surprise. I can only imagine where his mind must run to with that much information, delivered in such a pliant tone from my tough-as-nails mother. If he were smart, he'd know the gig is up and bolt in an attempt to place Dad's body as far away from the morgue as possible.

  I sincerely hope he chooses now not to be smart.

  As soon as Mom closes up her cell phone, Dad says, “Someone has to tie me up.”

  “We should put you in one of the empty crypts,” Dr. Hale suggests. “Just in case.”

  He pales at that, but gives her a determined nod. She heads off into the hallway to secure one of the crypts as Mom removes a pair of heavy-duty Borellian handcuffs from her utility belt. Borellian handcuffs are one of the more interesting items ransacked from the alien craft which crash-landed into the top floor of the Platt Building twenty years ago. They're meant to paralyze all of the flesh below the neck save the most vital of internal processes. You get hauled off to jail when you're captured with your hands stuck together at the small of your back and your entire body on pins and needles. But at least you don't ruin your underwear in the process.

  Dr. Hale reemerges in the office carrying a solid steel chair which makes up in durability what it completely lacks in comfort. Behind her, the eerie hiss of the sterile breached air escaping into the hall from an open crypt gives off an unsettling soundtrack. She beckons us with a wave of her hand towards the crypt in a silent cue for us to follow.

  She plops the chair down in the center of the empty crypt when we approach, and ducks around Dad as she exits. He gives the chair a long cold glare, then glances over at Graham, who hovers at the back of the group looking confused and out of place and angry about both.

  “You do it,” he says. “You won't leave any give because I'm in here, will you?”

  Graham's sole response is a disgusted grunt. He doesn't hesitate as he navigates around the rest of us to pluck the handcuffs from Mom's grasp and follow Dad into the crypt.

  Dad sits in the chair, hissing at the stark sudden cold pressing against his back, and Graham crouches beside the chair, his eyes narrowed as Dad places his closed fists through the slats in the chair's back. Graham secures the handcuffs around Dad's wrists with barely a hair's breadth of give, leaving Dad to strain against the bonds due more to a lack of comfort than a desire to escape.

  The two of them shoot icy glares at one another. Dad stifles a wince as the handcuffs lock shut.

  Graham doesn't look back as he leaves the crypt, and as soon as he steps out into the hallway Dr. Hale slams the door shut behind him. Words can't express how distressing it is to stand outside a ten-by-ten crypt with most of your family and stare inside at your restrained father, waiting for him to turn into a psychotic monster before your eyes.

  With her sub
ject locked securely behind glass, Dr. Hale slips into professional clinician mode with practiced ease. “You'll be weak for a while after the switch,” she says after flicking a button on the touchscreen beside the door to turn on the speaker. “I wouldn't make any plans to operate any heavy machinery for the next few hours, and unfortunately that includes your brain when you get back into your own body. No powers.”

  “No powers,” he confirms, nodding in understanding. “If I can.”

  She narrows her eyes at him through the glass. “It's not a suggestion, Mr. Noble. Bodyswaps drain powers for a while.”

  The muscle in his jaw tenses, a faint flicker from this distance. “I'll be useless if there's a fight to be had,” he warns.

  “Better here and useless than not here at all,” Mom murmurs.

  I'm not sure it's meant for Dad to hear. He catches it nonetheless, and the two of them share another one of those secretive looks through the glass.

  Dr. Hale reaches down and gives Sierra a boost, resting the little girl on her hip so they can both peer through the glass at my father. Dad leans forward and smiles at Sierra through the glass window, warm and grandfatherly. “I'm going to be very mean in a moment,” he gently warns.

  “I know,” she says in her small sweet voice.

  I grimace, not really wanting to recognize just how she would know that.

  Her eyes flicker a bright unreal shade of blue, the vivid color gone once again in a flash, and that's all it takes. Dad slumps in the chair with a pained groan, his secured wrists the only thing keeping him from collapsing to the floor. A brief instant passes where I expect his head to lift once again and everything to have stayed the same, Dad still locked behind John's ill-fitting facade.

  When his head raises once again, we all take a subconscious step back, even with the safety of the door separating us.

  We don't need a neon sign to tell us what's blatantly apparent, what screams out at us from behind a face pulled by unseen wires that tug and rearrange it into an eerie mask.

  That's not Everett Noble.

  “Well, well, well,” John says, turning the full weight of his chilling gaze towards me. His words drip like melting ice down my back. “Look who rolled back into town.”