25.
It's absurdly easy to dismiss John Camden.
What I remember of him from before I left the city in a costume-tossing huff is of a man who hovered just out of the corner of our collective eye at the Rafters. He washed and mended your costume and fixed your jetpack, kept all of your food cravings supplied and whipped up whichever frothy drink might relax you after a long day of rescuing civilians tied to train tracks or dangled over bonfires. If you asked me before today, I would have claimed he was harmless. He might be somewhere on the list of dangerous creatures between sleepy kittens and animated panda bears.
The hand-knitted sweater vest, the black-and-white checked ascot and delicate reading glasses … his attire always has done the talking for him, politely declining to be noticed. He embodies the consummate professional, the sort of highly trained servant who disappears into the décor as though that were his job, like some home furnishings ninja.
On that count, Dad's successfully played the part to the hilt for days now.
But now that Dad's been swapped out, replaced by this body's more psychologically questionable owner, invisible strings alter the landscape of John's normally kind face. Maniacal glee tugs his facial muscles into sinister angles.
I maintain my position in front of the door, but just barely.
“You're back, I see.”
John gives me a deferential nod at that, a mocking show of respect. “I could say the same for you. Pity about that. I would have thought you'd get stuck in that irritating hayseed.”
I stifle the urge to defend Nate, dismissing it as a waste of time. “What can I say? I didn't like the dress code.”
“And you found my toy, as well,” he says.
He can't see Sierra from where he sits, of course, still and frozen like a statue in that weighted steel chair. But his mere presence back in his own body is enough to alert him to her escape. “She's not a toy, John,” I say. My voice trembles with the thought of dark possibilities I'd rather not entertain.
Laughter rumbles up from deep inside his chest, a rich roasted sound like some charmer's endearments raked over hot coals. “The look on your face right now is absolutely priceless, Vera. You know that? I hope you don't think I did something … untoward to the child. I was more preoccupied texting photos of the two of you to her at just the right time to make sure she put you both where I wanted you, at least for a little while. No offense. I simply had more important things on my mind.”
My breath shudders out of me in hesitant relief. While he's done more than enough damage to prove himself untrustworthy, this much I believe from him. He's too far gone to care enough to lie about something like this.
The more important things he mentions, however, weigh on my mind like crushing stones. “Like stealing my father's life out from under him?”
“You say that as if he were using it,” John sneers, the hatred in his words tempered by the tinny echo rebounding off the enclosed walls. “I wonder, did he bother to look around at everything he had – power, money, a good name, a beautiful wife – before he started screwing the bad guy?”
He's not the only one who's wondered that, but I'm certainly not going to encourage him by backing him up.
Graham, however, seems to have no compunction about egging on a maniac. “Well, he did have to pack,” he mutters behind me.
Mom levels a warning look his way, but keeps blessedly quiet.
I grit my teeth as I stare in at John, at eerily focused eyes leveled at me from a downward angle only appropriate for unsettling threats. What would you do, I wonder, if you spent your entire life cooking elaborate snacks or fetching just the right entertainment magazine for whichever self-centered superpowered do-gooder required it, and in the end you ended up alone in a sub-basement apartment at the Rafters eating tuna out of a can during your meager off-hours?
Probably get frustrated and steal someone else's life, I imagine.
I lean close to the glass, near enough that I could easily kiss the window and leave a teasing pair of bright red lips printed there. “You've had one hell of a good time lately, haven't you?”
John's laugh bristles along my spine like it's been wrapped in barbed wire and soaked in hot sauce for good measure. “Not yet, I haven't.”
“Not yet? Oh, honey, jail isn't half the jamboree you seem to think it is.”
His lips curl, like a hissing snake poised to strike.
“Jail? I think I'll pass,” he says.
The handcuffs clatter to the floor just as Dad bursts through the fire door leading to the stairs, trailed by a belligerent crowd of howling citizens.
John stands, his unsteady gaze locked with mine the entire time. He fiddles with something on his wrist, adjusts it as he would a troublesome cufflink, and the door's lock audibly clicks open.
I step back out of reflex, fear flooding my stomach.
Something here is absolutely not right, I realize, right before I'm grabbed from behind.
My abuela once told me Dad could control the minds of those around him long before he could do anything else. She knew she was pregnant not because of a too-powerful kick or the supernatural movement of untouched items around her, but because people kept bringing her food. She would find herself craving pickles and peanut butter only to turn and find some confused random citizen bringing them both to her. He wasn't even born yet, but he wanted, and that was all it took.
Dad can force anyone to do anything, whether they want to or not. But he chooses not to, thanks to my abuela's firm training. The same cannot be said for John.
These aren't minions. These are slaves.
Worse, Dad's powers are so strong, his control won't wear off in spite of John's loss of possession of his body. They'll fight us for hours, until the command wears off or Dad changes their mind.
With Dad's powers on the fritz thanks to the switch, we'll be minion-wrangling for a good long time.
A muscular biker locks an arm around my neck with tightening brute force and I teleport before he can let go, dragging him along with me. I only release him from the grip of my powers once we reach our destination. When I teleport back, I abandon him to his own devices.
The SLB can retrieve him from the Australian outback later if I don't get around to it myself.
I pop out a few more unwilling minions with the same casual ease to varied but equally remote locations – the Alaskan wilderness, the Amazon River basin, the Himalayas. They may not have volunteered to be John's lackeys, but they can't be allowed to remain close to the morgue. They'll still try to get back even if I drop them off a mere four states away.
The moment I burst through the air back into the morgue hallway, my mind tumbles and swims, an odd sort of vertigo striking like a hard slap across the face.
I reach out and grab for the wall, tilting sideways on the precarious support of my heels, a sorry attempt to keep myself upright. It takes a moment for me to locate everyone else – my mother, sagging down to the floor with an arm wrapped around her midsection; Dad, his hands clutching his head; Dr. Hale, her teeth clenched as she smooths a cool hand across Sierra's sweat-dampened forehead, the little girl's pallor sickly and green.
John lurks at the head of the hallway, his vengeful glee barely restrained. His lips curl as he reaches for his right wrist. It's only then that I notice the small surreal door open in the skin there, revealing an intricate mass of cybernetic switches built into his arm.
The lunatic installed a damn power dampener into his body.
Each flick of the switches in his arm sends a sickening jolt through us all. It may be a dampener, a device everyone in the hallway is intimately familiar with. But it's more powerful than most, would have to be just to take down heroes as strong as my parents, would need to be beyond the pale for my father never to have discovered its hidden existence beneath the skin of his borrowed body. John would have added in the cybernetics, looked at Everett and Ivy Noble and done the math, and added in more and more and more.
&nb
sp; I can't imagine where he could have gotten them. The black market is rife with them, of course, and the right blackmail with the right supervillain will get you far. It's just a matter of infinite patience paired with a sharp mind, and John's always had both in his own quiet way.
He must have been planning this for years.
Correction … he must have known about Dad and Morris for years.
And instead of doing what anyone else in his place might have done – keep his tongue out of loyalty or sell his secrets to the tabloid most willing to pay – John stared at my mother, my gorgeous strong sharp-tongued mother, and seethed in silence.
The urge to teleport away from danger screams inside of me, demands I make a run for it and save my sorry hide before anyone else's. Instinct cries out, a teleporter's mind more flight than fight even in the best of scenarios.
The fact that the door to that option is firmly shut in my mind, locked by unseen hands, is not helping at all.
More mind-controlled minions bleed into the hallway from God only knows where, surging towards us like an army of rats charging away from disaster. All of us tense up, too confused by our sudden lack of powers to think straight at the moment. Dampeners don't usually affect the Noble family so strongly, at least not anything as compact as John's sporting, but whoever assembled the complex machinery built into his arm, if not his whole body, knew John's purposes well enough to install the robotic equivalent of a rocket launcher where others would have simply added a scalpel.
“Over here,” Dr. Hale calls, tapping out a practiced dance with her fingertips on the computer panel beside the crypt door she and Sierra crouch in front of.
Without powers, we bolt en masse to the enclosed safety of the open crypt, unconcerned with how we must look or what its current occupant must think of us, wherever he may be now. I'm the last one in, unused to running in or out of high heels. Dr. Hale herds the rest of the dizzy stumbling lot of us into the back of the crypt, away from the familiar body I'd rather not acknowledge, leaving me near the door to deal with the slowly stalking form of John following us down the hall.
Without worrying about the consequences, I slam the door shut and enable the locks.
The instant the others realize what I've done, all hell breaks loose.
A cluttered cacophony of angry voices drowns out the discordant chorus of subservient passersby deferring to John's orders in the hallway. “Shut up, every damn one of you,” I snap.
“The crypt locks from the outside, Vera,” my mother states, as though I didn't already know that.
“Good,” Dr. Hale says. “Some of us would rather stay safely out of the line of fire, but thanks for asking.”
“Yeah, well, the rest of us like the line of fire.” Graham throws a smug glare her way but Dr. Hale gives as good as she gets, tucking Sierra behind her as she narrows her eyes and dares him to try anything. It almost makes me wonder if she's indestructible or simply rash.
When he aims his irritation at me, I refuse to back down, blocking the door with my arms spread wide. “You don't have your powers. Or maybe you've forgotten in the twenty seconds we've been in this crypt.”
Mom throws her shoulders back and presses forward, intent on going out there regardless. “We can handle ourselves without our abilities –“
“Oh, really? When did this start? Because I don't recall any of you being particularly good at handling yourselves as everyday pedestrians. Remember that time you caught peacock flu and whined at me for the entire week each of you lost your powers? Unless something's drastically changed in the last five years, all three of you wimp out at the first sign that your powers are weakening. I can only presume that's why John got those shiny new upgrades of his. I bet he knew full well that every remaining Noble in the city couldn't rescue a kitten from a tree on a sunny day given a ladder and an entire fire brigade if their powers konked out.”
Mom and Graham reluctantly pull back at that, unable to deny just how petulant they can be whether weak or strong. Even at their worst, at least Graham and Mom have the mental fortitude to recognize that they can be temperamental and spoiled, their egos overflowing into the empty space left behind by their ultra-slim senses of self-preservation.
Dad, on the other hand, charges forward anyway and pounds on the door with fists just as human and normal as they always are.
“Dad,” I say, my voice soft.
“I have to get out of here, goddamn it.”
“And do what? Pummel his bionic arm with your terribly angry thoughts?”
“Vera, he used me to kill Morris.”
“Dad, now is not the time.”
“He was in me when he killed Morris,” he snaps. “Damn straight, now is the time.”
He's not angry with me, of course. He's angry about the body on the slab that none of us can bring ourselves to fully recognize by name, laid out under a precisely draped towel as though he's fallen asleep on the massage table at a day spa.
If he were alive right now, Morris would never stop lamenting being seen like this.
But even without his powers, Dad's discomfort bleeds through the room like a potent drug at the bruises in the shapes of his knuckles marring the body's skin. Dr. Hale hugs her niece and stares up at my father with faint pity peeking out from behind her eyes. Graham leans his head back against the wall where he's propped himself, his body wracked with trembles I get the impression none of us are supposed to notice. Even my mother shoots Dad a look full of dismay and need, offering a shoulder to rest his weary head on, knowing full well he'll turn her down once again.
I look over at my father, his gaze almost desperately diverted away from the body.
It's not as hard as I would have thought to know what I have to do.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I slip Nate's little plastic present from where I've hidden it inside my cleavage, flip open the small clasp with a flick of my thumb and remove the prepared syringe filled with blood.
Nate's blood. Immortal blood. It revived a zombie. I can't imagine a normal corpse would be much more difficult for it to fix.
Dad makes a choked sound as I pull off the cap over the needle with my teeth and jam the syringe into the pasty skin of Morris's chest directly over his long-dead heart. I force down the plunger and hold my breath as the miniscule amount of blood threads its way through the needle into Morris's inert body. As soon as it's been emptied I pull the needle out and pitch it across the room, ignoring the tinny clatter as it skids across the linoleum.
Dad's voice has an unsteady ring as he whispers, “What did you do?”
“I'm getting us a weapon,” I say, unable to look away from the body.
I fix my eyes on Morris, and I wait.
And wait.
And wait some more, until the tightly held air hitches out of my lungs and Dad's hands appear out of nowhere to skim over the surface of Morris's flesh. Even Graham turns to look, waiting, waiting –
When Morris breathes – finally, finally – the high wheezy sound of it sends us all scrambling backwards in shock.
“Morris?”
Dad's voice barely carries, and when he speaks the words choke off in a brittle gasp.
Morris coughs, a ragged awful sound that somehow brings a healthy flush to too-pale skin. “You had better be Everett,” he rasps, “because I've had quite enough of pummeling imposters for one day.”
No one corrects him on how long it's been since he died. Dad's too busy laughing, lowering his voice as he cups Morris's cheek. I back away to give him space. It's hard to ignore everyone else in the room shooting me dark looks laced with disgust or resignation or maybe even a little relief, but I manage it quite nicely, if I do say so myself.
I may be the only one who looks away when Dad and Morris kiss simply to give them their privacy.
Mom, on the other hand, has no problem glaring at the both of them.
She must be in a better mood than I thought. Normally when she stares at someone like that, they're melting int
o a puddle of meat sauce due to her heat vision by now.
Graham signals to me with a few deliberate clicks of his tongue, summoning me to his new place by the door as though we're on some ludicrous secret mission for the Brigade like we used to be. I make a face as I swerve around my glaring mother to come to his side. He cocks his chin towards the window in the door for me to look out into the hallway.
“He's using the bodies as weapons,” Graham hisses my way.
I roll my eyes. “Of course he is,” I say, peering out to spot a pair of glassy-eyed scientists from another section of the building hacking into the touchscreen beside the door to the crypt opposite and to the left of us.
“They're more powerful weapons than they look to be.” Dr. Hale sidles up beside us and eyes the makeshift minions with barely veiled contempt through the glass. They don't appear to notice or care that we're watching. “Most folks don't quite let it sink in why we keep these bodies in storage here. If they did, we might actually warrant a real goddamn security team for a change.”
She points to the crypt John's mental slaves have taken to task, first with highly delicate electronic lock-breakers and, when frustration gets the best of them in some cases we can see, then with the nearest blunt object. One mind-controlled janitor pounds away with a sledgehammer at the touchscreen for the crypt three doors down from us. From the sound of things, if he hasn't thwacked a significant dent in the door, it's certainly not from lack of trying.
“The Ferret is in that crypt. He and Lord Spirit are both scheduled to go nuclear within the week. Their crypts are set specifically for containment under those circumstances. Penny Rocket's gestating a dozen minor interdimensional alien gods we can't destroy without breaking half a dozen anti-abortion treaties spanning four universes. Twelve infant gods who think you're their daddy are some pretty powerful weapons in and of themselves. And the Plague is carrying the plague. Unsurprisingly.”
“The Plague died?” I blurt out, unable to resist a mournful sigh. He was a nice guy, the incurable diseases he passed around like free candy on Halloween notwithstanding. “Nobody tells me anything.”
Heroine Addiction Page 27