Hero Status

by Kristen Brand

  It went on like that for I didn’t know how long. I kept hearing car engines and moving to check, the headlights making my headache flare, but none of them was Irma. My mouth was dry and full of an awful taste, and I was amazed I even noticed it. Surely, all my brain sensors were receiving pain signals. How was there room for me to sense anything else? I was dully aware of the fence digging into my back and rocks underneath me, but didn’t care enough to adjust my position. I kept nodding off and having to shake myself awake. It was torture.

  I needed a watch. What was the time? What if Trick and Treat had already left the club?

  Panic made me nauseated, and I tried to calm myself down. It was a club. The place would be open until the early hours of the morning. Trick and Treat might not even make an appearance until after midnight.

  Everything was hazy. My brain just wouldn’t seem to work. I would say it needed a kick to get going, but it’d had enough of that already. I couldn’t just sit here. How long should I wait for Irma? Without any sort of clock, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Pain was making everything slow. It could have only been a few minutes.

  At long last, a car slowly approached, Irma in the driver’s seat. I pulled myself up, accidentally tearing down more of the fence, and stumbled out into the street.

  As I slowly made my way, I was afraid she wouldn’t see me, but she reversed, parked, and jumped out of the car.

  “How’s Eddy?” I asked, as she put an arm around me and helped me into the passenger’s seat.

  “Tell him how you are, Eddy,” she said, closing the door for me.

  Eddy stirred. He was lying across the back seat, looking like death warmed over. He made a noise somewhere between a groan and a grunt, and then asked, “You?”

  I made the same noise in response.

  “Men are such whiners,” Irma said, sliding back into the driver’s seat. Her tone was light, but her eyebrows were drawn together, and she stomped on the accelerator. “Hold on. I’m taking you both to a doctor.”

  The digital clock on the dashboard read half past nine. The club probably wasn’t even open yet. I sagged in the seat and let my eyes close.

  It wasn’t too late.

  Chapter 11

  The first time I’d lost Elisa, I hadn’t even known she was mine.

  It was near the end of my career. Based on an anonymous tip someone had called in on the Black Valentine, I was searching an empty old church after dark. My secret romance with Val had come and gone, and I hadn’t seen her in years. She’d become a less active, more cautious supervillain, though at the time, I hadn’t known the reason why. She definitely hadn’t tried a bank robbery in broad daylight in a while, and I hadn’t been assigned to one of her cases in years. I was only responding to the anonymous tip because I’d been in Boston by sheer coincidence and the local superhero hadn’t had experience with telepathy.

  It wasn’t a great time for me, personally. Moreen and I were over, too. Things had been going south for a while, but I’d thought we could work it out if we just stuck together. Moreen had wanted to move on before we started to truly hate each other. She’d already said she’d probably murder me if we lived under the same roof for much longer. I’d say I had let her go, but I hadn’t had much say in the matter, honestly. Later, I would come to realize it was for the best, that we worked much better as friends than lovers, but at the time, I wasn’t there yet.

  Career-wise, I wasn’t much better. I was approaching the age when they retired superheroes from active duty, and I didn’t know what I’d do with myself. I could move up into DSA administration like Moreen, or I could get a full-time position at the Academy and teach the next generation of heroes. Both options held only lukewarm appeal. To tell the truth, I wanted to settle down and start a family, but that ship had sailed a long time ago. Or so I’d thought.

  Those worries were far from my mind at the time, however. If Val was really nearby, and I dropped my guard, she’d take me down, regardless of the feelings we’d once had for each other—still had for each other? I wasn’t sure. I crept cautiously past the rows of empty pews, songbooks stacked neatly in their shelves. The church was eerie in the dark, the old building creaking and groaning. Night sapped the color from the stained-glass windows, and shadows played on the faces of statues of saints. The faint scent of incense still lingered in the air, and I thought I could smell Val’s perfume, but it must have been my imagination. Surely, she wasn’t using the exact same one after all these years. The mere memory of that fragrance filled me with a melancholy longing, which I quickly suppressed; those kinds of feelings aren’t safe around a telepath.

  I approached the front of the church, the chair for the priest empty, the candles in their tall brass holders unlit. The cloth over the altar was so white it seemed to glow like a ghost.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She emerged from the darkness on the other side of the room. If I’d been in possession of my senses, I would have attacked, gone on the defensive, told her she was under arrest—anything but stand there and stare at her like an idiot, which was what I did. Everything I’d tried to forget about her—about us—came rushing back, a thousand little moments and feelings. I remembered how soft her skin felt under my fingers, the sound of her laugh, the hole that felt like it had been punched through my chest when we’d had to end it. And after all that time, here she was. My knees trembled, and I forgot to breathe.

  Her costume had changed, but so had mine. We were both older, and suddenly I couldn’t believe how young we’d been once. How different was she now? How different was I? Would the people we’d become still…?

  I stopped that train of thought, furious with myself. I had a job to do. I couldn’t let her affect me like this, especially after all these years; it was stupid. We were long over, and our lives hadn’t changed that much. We still couldn’t be together. I shouldn’t feel this way, but then I shouldn’t have before, either, and that had never stopped me.

  She rushed toward me, her lips parted in shock, and I thought she must be having the same reaction I was to her, but then she brought up her hands and shoved me.

  “You can’t be here. Get out!”

  I stumbled back from surprise rather than the force of her push. “Val, what—”

  Her hands were clenched into fists, her eyes red. Had she been crying? I’d never once seen her cry.

  “I’m meeting a contact here.” Her voice was strained. “If she sees you, she’ll run. Are you alone?”

  “Backup’s outside.”

  “You idiot! You’ve probably already scared her away. You—” She grabbed the priest’s chair and threw it, hitting the pews below with a loud crack that echoed through the whole church. I looked at her, dazed, not sure whether to slap handcuffs on her or try to comfort her. She turned and slammed her hands down onto the altar. “No, no, no.” Her back was to me, but I could see her body quivering. “You’ve ruined everything.”

  Suddenly she was like a stranger. I reminded myself that I hadn’t seen her in years, that people changed. She wasn’t necessarily the same woman I’d known and loved. And yet, never in a thousand years had I thought she’d end up like this. Val wasn’t one for emotional outbursts. She was always in control. She just seemed so… out of it.

  “What on earth is wrong?” I asked.

  She still didn’t face me. When she spoke, it was like she was talking to herself.

  “I’ll never find him now.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Sweet.”

  My stomach felt cold. Something was very wrong with her. I hesitantly reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Val… Dr. Sweet is dead. You helped kill him. Remember?”

  She turned, wrenching her shoulder from my grasp. “I remember, but he’s back.”

  She glared at me, but at the same time, she was trying to blink away tears. Tears. Val.

  “Did someone drug you?” I asked.

  “No!” she snarled. Then she put he
r hands over her mouth, her shoulders sagging. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. “He has my daughter.”

  “What?”

  “He took her. He—” Her voice broke, and she whispered, “Oh God.”

  While my brain was trying to work around the daughter part, my instincts took over, and I put my arms around her. The rational part of my mind was shouting that I was in the middle of an operation, that I didn’t even know her anymore, that I should be arresting her, not getting involved. But as you must know by now, I’m very good at ignoring the rational part of my mind.

  “What happened?”

  Val pushed away from me, shaking her head. “I have to go. I have to find her.”

  “I can help.”

  She stopped and looked at me, her expression tight not exactly with suspicion, but certainly not with trust. I hoped she wouldn’t ask why I was offering, because I wasn’t so sure myself. There were a lot of smarter things I should have been doing—a lot of more legal things—but… Val was crying. She needed me.

  And I still loved her.

  “She was on a field trip.” Val had apparently come to a decision, and her breathing steadied. “Some stupid historical tour. It was supposed to be educational.” She laughed a little, a hollow sound, and for a second, it looked like she might cry again. “We had a few men guarding her. We always do. But they’re dead, and she’s gone. There was a No-Man’s corpse at the scene, shot through the head.”

  “And you’re sure—”

  “It was a No-man. I know one when I see it. Do you… Have your people heard anything?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

  Some of the tension drained from her, but only a little. She was still shivering, the horror still evident in her eyes. “Thank you.”

  I nodded. “How do you want me to contact you?”

  “Don’t. I’ll be in touch.”

  I didn’t question her. Throughout the years of our relationship, our countless nightly rendezvous, she’d always been able to find me, DSA security or not.

  That reminded me. “My backup outside…”

  “How many?”

  “Five out front. Two around back.”

  “Hardly any at all.” A ghost of a smile played on her face before sorrow overtook it. “Dave…” She looked down, stopping herself. “I’ll see you soon.”

  She turned and hurried away.

  I stood there and looked at the door she’d disappeared through, my head light and dizzy. I had to think of something to tell the backup about how she’d escaped, but I’d spent years lying to the DSA about my run-ins with the Black Valentine; it shouldn’t be a hard skill to pick back up. I was more worried about what she’d said about Dr. Sweet, and what I’d gotten myself into by telling her I’d help, how I wasn’t even sure how to start.

  But who was I kidding? That wasn’t what I really focused on. The only thing making it through my thick head was one word: daughter. She had a daughter. For how long? I told myself not to make any assumptions, that the child could only be a few years old for all I knew.

  But of course, I wondered if she was mine.

  • • •

  Walter was my boss at the time. I called his home phone and gave him an edited rundown of what had happened. As an ex-DSA agent, he was used to being woken in the dead of night and came to alertness fairly quickly. I still had to repeat a few things, though.

  “But she said he has her daughter.”

  “She doesn’t have a daughter,” Walter said. “We’d know if she did.”

  “She could have hidden her with some effort. We’ve never been able to get much intel on the Belmontes.”

  “She was lying to you, Dave. It’s obvious.”

  I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see me. “If she was lying, she’d have come up with a better story.”

  “Dr. Sweet is dead. Three bullets to the chest and a cracked skull. You were there.”

  “It’s not completely impossible—”

  “We took the body to the morgue. It was cremated. There are records.”

  “Bodies can be switched.”

  The line was silent for several long seconds. “Why are you arguing this? If I didn’t know better, I’d say she got into your head.”

  My heart rate jumped, but I was good enough that I didn’t give any sign of it in my voice. “I’ve been assigned to her a lot over the years, you know that. I’ve seen her lie. I think she was telling the truth this time. And if she was, then Dr. Sweet is out there somewhere and a young girl’s life is in danger.”

  Walter groaned. “Fine. Maybe she believed what she was saying. But that just means she’s finally cracked. She’s a telepath. You know how they are.”

  “But she—”

  “That’s the end of it,” he said sharply. “We don’t have the budget or manpower to waste chasing dead men and nonexistent girls. You’ve got more important things to do, and I’m going back to bed. Good night.”

  I was a good little superhero and didn’t argue any further, but that wasn’t the end of it, not for me. If I didn’t have the DSA’s official help, I still had their resources. The moment I hung up the phone, I went straight to a computer and accessed the department’s database. The obvious starting point was Dr. Sweet, but his file hadn’t been updated since his “death” all those years ago. I started to browse through it on the chance some clue would catch my eye, but it was huge, and the photographs of his victims made my stomach churn. I had to narrow my search.

  Val’s daughter had been taken while she was in Boston. I checked to see if Dr. Sweet had ever held any hideouts in the city.

  He’d never even been here, at least according to our records. Dead end.

  I drummed my fingers on the edge of the computer, trying to think of another approach. Boston. I closed out of Dr. Sweet’s file and brought up the city's recent crime reports. Mostly it was the usual stuff: robberies, assaults, drug busts, a murder…

  And an apparent spike in the number of missing persons.

  Goosebumps rose on my arms. That was Dr. Sweet’s MO. Whenever he was in a city, people started disappearing, because he grabbed them off the street for his experiments.

  I dialed Walter’s number again.

  “The number of missing persons in Boston has doubled.”

  “Go to bed, Dave.”

  He hung up on me. I was on my own, but this wasn’t the first time I’d taken unauthorized action for Val, and I’d always managed by myself before. Dr. Sweet was in the city; I just needed to find out where.

  This was the DSA; all the cases we dealt with involved people with special abilities, the people Dr. Sweet targeted. It was easy to find records of superhuman-related crime in Boston, but less easy to isolate what I was looking for.

  A man who could control his density was being sued for damaging property; evidently, he’d crushed a section of flooring inside a shopping mall. A prostitute was under investigation based on accusations of having the ability to generate sex pheromones. A street gang called the Sons of Super was causing a lot of problems in East Boston, apparently led by a telekinetic. None of it… Wait.

  One of the Sons of Super had been arrested a few days ago, and he had a special ability. His skin secreted a rare poison, and they’d found him dirty and half-dead in the street. He claimed a mad scientist had held him prisoner and collected his secretions. The police had investigated the location, a medical research facility in Longwood, but found nothing. They concluded the man had either made up the whole thing or had a drug-induced hallucination.

  It was a lead. Not much, but worth checking out. The question was whether it was enough to bring in Val. I wasn’t sure it was really Dr. Sweet, and the police had done at least a cursory search of the scene and found nothing. Heck, it might be old news as far as Val was concerned. She and I hadn’t had time to share information.

  I could look into it on my own and get in touch with her if I found anything, but Val was telepathic. She had a wh
ole sense I lacked, and it would be stupid to leave her out and end up missing something. I left the Boston DSA branch and went back to my hotel room on the theory it would be easier for her to contact me there. Sure enough, when I opened the door, she was inside.

  She was hunched over in the room’s only chair, dressed in a classic khaki trench coat over black pants and boots. At the sight of me, she surged to her feet.

  “Anything?” she asked, unable to hide the hope in her voice.

  I had to focus to relax my mind enough to let her in, since I’d gotten used to fighting telepaths rather than cooperating with them. She plucked the information right out of my head.

  “That’s got to be it.” Her voice was breathy, and her knees trembled. There was a second where I thought she was going to fall, but she walked forward and threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she whispered, her body trembling against mine. “Thank you. Oh, Dave—” She pulled away, shaking herself, and reached for the door. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t move. I needed a moment to brace myself to ask the question I was dreading.

  “Val…” My heart thumped in my throat. “Who’s the father?”

  She went still, her shoulders tensing, and I kicked myself for overstepping my bounds. I had no right to ask her something like that.

  It was a moment before she answered, “Nobody you know.”

  I studied her face, looking for any sign that she was lying. It was so hard to tell with her.

  “Stop being ridiculous,” she said. “I would have told you if she was yours.”

  “Would you have?”

  She looked away. “We don’t have time for this, Dave.”

  She was right. I nodded and followed her out the door at nearly a run. But as we rushed down the hall, I couldn’t help but dwell on the way she hadn’t met my eyes. It was such an obvious giveaway, though, that I wondered if she’d faked it. Was she teasing me with the possibility of fatherhood to manipulate me into helping her? Or was she lying to my face about the fact that I had a daughter?