Luminous

by Corrina Lawson

  A mad scientist? Great. Add that to the crazy list. “That’s hard to believe.”

  Noir could be as unbalanced as this “Jack” obviously was. Too bad. He wondered if her face matched the killer body.

  He shook his head, walked to the kitchen and pulled a Coke out of the fridge. He needed a break to think of his next move. She was either crazy or had information he needed. Or both. Whichever it was, he wanted to keep her talking.

  “Want a drink?” he called.

  “No.”

  “Right, that would require you to show your face.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?” she snapped.

  He opened the Coke and leaned in the kitchen doorway. “If I hadn’t seen the bank video, I’d think you were insane. And I’d be arresting you for breaking into my apartment.”

  “But you’ve seen what Jack can do. And you need me.”

  “Maybe.” He chugged the Coke, wishing it were beer. But not while he was on duty. Okay, probably not ever, if he was being honest with himself. “But why come to me? Sure, I’m a detective, but I wasn’t the senior detective on the scene.”

  “I saw you there,” she said in a whisper. “I saw how you reacted to the victims. You care. You want to help.”

  “You were watching me?” Just how had she snuck into the crime scene?

  “I was looking for Jack.” A pause. “I picked up his trail but I got there too late.”

  “I didn’t see anyone who looked remotely like you.” Though how could he know that when he really hadn’t seen her? There was no telling what she looked like without the cape, cowl, hat and all that black leather.

  “I stayed out of sight,” she said.

  “I’ll bet.” He sighed. “Look, I know Jack’s real. I know I need to catch him. That’s why I’m listening to you. But how do I know your information is good? For all I know, you’re as crazy as he is.”

  “I can tell you what kind of equipment Jill uses for her lab and some of the chemicals she needs. Would that help track her down to where the hostage might be?”

  “It would.” It definitely would. Crazy or not, it was the best lead he had, and that missing bank teller wasn’t getting any safer as time passed. But he needed more to go on.

  Al set the empty can on the counter. “The thing is, I need a reason to trust you. For all I know, you could be working with Jack and Jill. Or making them up. Or have a hidden agenda. Right now, all I have is someone who broke into my place. You see the problem?”

  She stood and the cape swirled around her. “I’ve got to stop them. I’ve got to save the hostage.”

  “Why you?” he said. “What’s your angle?”

  She said nothing.

  “Maybe you have a speech ready about great power bringing great responsibility?”

  She snorted. “Not likely.”

  “At least let me see your face. I can’t trust someone who won’t look me in the eye.”

  “You’ll be waiting a long time for that.” She put out a hand. “But, yeah, I see your problem. I know I sound crazy—” She began pulling off a glove, finger by finger. “Like I said, Jill’s playing with altering DNA. I don’t know exactly what she’s doing. I didn’t pay enough attention in science class, I guess. But I’m familiar with the results.”

  Noir finished taking off the glove and held up her arm for inspection. “Jill did this to me.”

  There was no hand above the wrist cuff.

  “She cut off your hand? Fuck!” Al walked closer.

  “No, you’ve got it wrong,” she said. “Hold out your hand and I’ll show you.”

  He did as she asked. She extended the arm that ended at the wrist to him, as if she meant to give him a phantom handshake.

  His hand was gripped by…something. It felt just like a handshake. He could feel the impressions of her fingers on the back of his hand.

  But he couldn’t see them.

  His mouth fell open. “Your hand is invisible?”

  “Not just my hand.” Her grip tightened. “My whole body is invisible.”

  Chapter Two

  Noir watched Lieutenant James’s face for any sign of fear. His mouth twisted in shock. But he didn’t grimace. He didn’t freak.

  And he didn’t try to back away from her touch.

  Instead, he took a deep breath. “What happened to you, Noir?”

  It was a quiet question and full of the same compassionate tone he’d used when talking to the bank manager at the scene.

  “What happened to you?” he asked again, even softer this time.

  “Jill happened. I got away, but not until she did this to me.”

  He frowned. “Just how old are you?”

  She yanked her hand away from him and jammed her glove back on. She’d come to him as someone who could help but instead he saw her as a victim. “I manage just fine, Lieutenant.”

  But it had been nice, touching someone who didn’t shrink from her. And his hand had felt warm and strong in her grip.

  “I can tell that from the way you break into apartments,” he snapped back. “But I can’t see you and I need to know.”

  Right. She decided to tell him the truth. Hiding all the time was getting old.

  “I’m in my twenties, if that matters.” Well, that’s what she thought. She didn’t know her exact age any longer. That was gone, along with any hint of who she’d been.

  “What happened with Jill, Noir?”

  “She kept me captive for five years, give or take a few months. I was one of her lab rats.”

  “I can help you,” James said. “Call your family, get you to a doctor who might be able to—”

  “No,” she snapped again. “I’m here to help you to find Jack and Jill and rescue the teller.” She backed up, putting more distance between them.

  “Okay,” he said and seemed to come to a decision. “Sit down, relax.”

  “I don’t want to relax. I want to get moving and find Jack and Jill.”

  “Yeah, you made that clear, but I’m not setting foot outside this room until I know more. Odds on rescuing a hostage are lousy at best. I need everything you can tell me. That means I need to interview you, and I’m going to be damn thorough because every little scrap of info increases the odds of a good result. That means I’m about to ask you questions that you’re going to hate. If you really want to help, you’ll sit down and answer them.”

  Well, at least he didn’t pity her any longer.

  “Why are you called Detective Fixit?” she asked.

  He scowled. “Because they’re assholes. The name, for future reference, is Aloysius James. James, if you like, or Lieutenant, or just Al.”

  Touchy, she thought. She sat back down in the armchair. The black mesh mask scratched her cheek. But if she took it off, he’d be interviewing a face that wasn’t there. He’d let her touch him without flinching. But speaking to the empty space above the collar of her jacket would freak him out. It did everyone else. Hell, she freaked when she couldn’t see her reflection in a mirror. And they said it was just vampires. Hah.

  She closed her eyes and sighed. This was the most comfortable piece of furniture she’d rested on in a long time. A month ago, she’d snuck into a furniture store, stripped and slept naked on one of those wonderful mattresses. She’d overslept and almost been caught the next morning. The store owner couldn’t see her but he’d sure seen the outline of her body on the mattress.

  After that, she’d been much more careful. That limited her places to rest. And finding places to sleep had delayed her search for Jack, which was why she’d missed catching him at the bank.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Your real name.”

  I’d like to know too. She shrugged. “I told you.”

  He threw up his hands. “Fine. Let’s move on for now. Everything you know, every detail, no matter how small, is important, even if you think it’s trivial. We’ll start at the beginning. When and where did you first encounter this Jack
and Jill?”

  “On the street,” she said.

  “Of Charlton City?”

  “No, not this city.”

  He ran his hand through his thick, dark hair. “Look, if this is the way this is going to go, then I’ll move on to arresting you for breaking and entering. You want that?”

  “I’m not—” But she was. Evasion was habit now, to cover the holes in her memory. “Right. Keep asking. I’ll do better.”

  “You were on the streets of…?”

  “Queen City,” she said. “I accidentally sliced my hand. Jill ran the clinic and I went to get fixed up. I also heard she gave kids who needed it a place to crash, no questions asked.” That’s what her vague memories told her, anyway.

  “Back up,” James said, writing in his notebook. “Give me the name of the clinic that Jill was running.”

  She frowned. “Um, I think it was the Forest Heights Free Clinic. Something like that. It was definitely in Forest Heights, though.”

  “Street address?”

  No idea. “I’m not sure.”

  He very deliberately put down his notebook and pencil. “Did I mention I need every detail you can remember, no matter how trivial?”

  “Look, cop, you try remembering after years of being stabbed with needles and given painkillers and anesthetics so often that you can’t even string two words together and then being tossed into a room until you recovered so it could start all over again.”

  That sounded bitterer than she wanted. She felt tears well up in her eyes. No more of that. She wasn’t some dumb kid being used as a lab rat anymore. She was Noir now. She had power. She had freedom. Fuck self-pity.

  He picked up his notebook again. “Understood. You really don’t remember.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so let’s walk through what you can remember,” he said. “And, again, try ‘Al’, not ‘cop’.”

  “Whatever.” She swallowed and started talking about her ordeal, the words unexpectedly spilling out to him. Maybe it was because he shared her need to get Jack off the street. Maybe it was knowing that her words could save someone from what she’d been through. Or maybe it was just nice to sit in a safe room and speak to a human being who was really listening.

  “The first time Jill gave me a shot, she said it was for tetanus. I didn’t argue. The second shot was supposed to be some sort of inoculation. She said I might get sick a little. I got so sick that I threw up a bunch of times and then passed out.”

  Never, ever would a doctor touch her again. “I woke up in the laboratory, strapped down to a table. After that, it all gets foggy. Eventually, I got out.”

  “Noir, I know this can’t be easy. Just tell me whatever you remember.”

  She clenched her jaw. More pity. No, wait, maybe something more. He hadn’t exactly pitied the survivors of the bank massacre. He’d been kind to them.

  She looked at him, seeing the person and not the cop for the first time. He wasn’t like all the callow pretty boys she’d seen preening on the streets. Al was rugged and solid. He got shit done. In the bank, everyone else had been too afraid or shocked to do anything. In five minutes, Al had had the video of Jack wrecking the place up and running.

  She paused, cleared her throat and started talking again.

  “Some days, it was a matter of an IV drip. That always zoned me out but at least it didn’t hurt. Other days, she’d inject me with stuff and I’d feel like I was going to die. And she hooked me up to a zillion monitors. I had wires going all over me.” At first, she’d been embarrassed to be naked all the time. After a while, being naked had been nothing next to the rest of it.

  “Describe the medical devices you can remember,” Al said. “Big, little, boxy, circular, tall, short, whatever you can remember. Manufacturers’ labels would be a huge help.”

  She described the machines in more detail. Even The Torturer, as she’d come to call it, the machine that sent electric currents through her every ten minutes for a week straight. At least, that first week was all she remembered or wanted to remember. She hugged herself tight and heard her voice run down to a raspy whisper.

  “Jill said The Torturer was some sort of thing to track nerve-to-nerve messages. I think she fucking got off on it.” Noir could still hear Jill’s clipped words as she noted the results of the “experiment”: “Subject Six, tracking sciatic nerve transmission.” Jill had never called her anything but “Subject Six”.

  “She probably did. How did you get away?”

  “When I could think straight, I looked for a way out. Most of the time I was so weak, I couldn’t stand even in my little room. One day, I just wished hard that I was invisible, that she and Jack wouldn’t see me. I wanted so bad not to be pulled into the lab again.” At first, Noir thought she’d gone over the edge. “And I woke up this way. Crazy, right? Who just turns invisible? But I’d seen Jack transform from a relatively big guy to a monster, and I knew Jill was doing genetic research. Jill was fascinated by my transformation, but even she was surprised. Me, I stopped caring about why and started caring about getting out. After all I went through, escaping was as easy as walking out an open door right in front of Jill when she thought I safely locked away somewhere else.” Noir rubbed the armrests. “It took me about a month to feel normal after I got out of there.”

  “Then you went after them.”

  “Damn straight. It took me another two months, but I finally got a lead that they moved here, to Charlton City. But I couldn’t find where. I couldn’t find them before Jack went into the bank.”

  “Maybe you were just in time, Noir. There’s still a life at stake. What you just gave me could help save him.”

  Al, I could kiss you for that. She leaned back in the chair. She wouldn’t mind kissing him. He had those nice broad shoulders. And muscles—she shouldn’t forget the muscles he was hiding. “I hope so.”

  “Just a few more questions. How big was this place where you were held? Total square footage and the number of rooms?”

  “Why do you need to know that? Jill’s not in that place any longer.”

  Al put his pad down. “People repeat patterns. If Jill has moved to Charlton and she’s interested in the same kind of research—and given she grabbed a living subject, I’ll bet she is—she’ll look for a similar facility. We start looking at out-of-the-way locations that match the original profile and we’ve got a place to start and a chance to get to the teller in time.”

  “Oh.” Noir shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’m lousy at describing it.”

  “Can you see it in your head?”

  “Some.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. Stay right there.”

  He disappeared down the hallway. She guessed he was going into his office. That’s where she’d hidden to put her clothes on after she’d followed him inside. She’d been lucky it had been dark so he hadn’t seen the bundle of clothes wrapped up in her cape that seemingly floated in midair. Though how he could find anything in that mess of his office, she had no idea. Even his old typewriter was covered in books. Not a man big on technology. He enjoyed being on the street, looking into things personally at ground level, she guessed. She liked that about him.

  She liked a lot of things about him.

  Al returned with a spiral-bound sketchpad and flipped it open.

  “You describe it to me, I’ll draw, and we’ll see if we can get close to what it looked like.”

  She smiled. “Let me. I can draw pretty well.” She had started drawing just two days after her escape, filling a notebook she’d stolen with images from her memory. Whoever she had been before, she knew being an artist had something to do with it.

  “Good, because I suck at it.” He held out the pencil.

  She cleared her throat. “If I’m going to be completely accurate, I’ll have to take off my gloves so I can have better control of the pencil.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “And I have to take off the mask. I’ll be able to draw in the finer
details without the black mesh over my eyes.”

  “Whatever you need to do.”

  She wondered if he’d be so quick to agree after he started speaking to a head he couldn’t see. She removed her gloves without looking at him. She flexed her hands once before reaching up to remove the hat and face mask.

  She knew she looked like a headless, handless body in a horror movie.

  “Well,” Al drawled. “That must save on the makeup costs.”

  She laughed for the first time in a long time. “Not one of my main worries, no.”

  He held the pencil toward her again. This time, she took it. Al stood up. “I’m getting you some water. You’ve been talking a long time.”

  “Okay.” She hadn’t been talking that long. He probably was just being kind again. She sat back in the chair with the sketchpad on her lap. The pencil flew over the paper as if it had a mind of its own. She knew she was good at this. She wished she remembered where she’d learned it.

  She hardly noticed when Al set a glass of water on the coffee table in front of her. She was aware he’d left the room again but she was so engrossed in her drawing that she didn’t think about what he was doing until she smelled eggs cooking.

  She looked up from her nearly finished sketch to the entranceway of the small kitchen area. “That smells great.” Her stomach rumbled. She chugged the glass of water.

  “Somehow, I figured you hadn’t had much to eat.” He stirred the scrambled eggs. “I’m not sure whether it’s closer to dinner or breakfast, so I went with breakfast. You can eat, right?”

  “Yeah.” She stood up and displayed the sketchpad. “This is done.”

  He blinked at her for a second and cleared his throat. “Great. Bring it here, grab a plate, then you can tell me about it.”

  She did exactly as he asked, setting the sketchpad on the kitchen counter and picking up a plate. Her stomach growled. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He looked at the plate she held for a few seconds. “You’ve got a good grip, right?”

  “Sure.” She guessed he was weirded out by the plate seemingly floating in air. She had to admit, it had taken her some time to get used to it. Al wasn’t doing so bad.