The Superheroes Union: Dynama
Page 10
“It’s okay,” she said, keeping her voice even and projecting reassurance and belief with every ounce of her being. “It’s going to be okay. Mama is on her way, and even if it’s Daddy outside, he won’t let you get hurt. He loves you, and he won’t let you get hurt.”
She hoped TJ was right about that.
“I want to go home,” Marisol said, reaching for her seatbelt as the car rose through the air.
Annmarie’s heart leapt into her throat. “Marisol, leave your seatbelt buckled.” She stretched as far as she could between the seats, reaching out to take the little girl’s hand. “We’re getting moved around a little bit right now, and it might get bumpy. As soon as we’re stopped, I’ll come back there with you, but right now, I need you to stay in your seatbelt.” Marisol’s hand squeezed hers tightly.
The car bucked and shifted beneath them, turning fewer circles now as it rose higher. Annmarie had a good, if nauseating, view of the street below them as the nose of the car angled down, the heavier engine block rising more slowly than the rest of it.
“It’s like The Wizard of Oz, Mari,” Esteban said in that same tight voice, but he’d forced a smile to his face. “Everything’s going by the window, but we’ll be okay, because we’re in the center.”
It wouldn’t be true if this were any natural storm, but Annmarie knew better. First the sudden lack of gravity, then the cyclonic wind—not nearly enough to lift a car on its own, but very effective when gravity didn’t apply.
Was Singularity just the gravity power, or was he also the spiral wind? If she opened the window and shouted outside that he was terrifying his kids, would he hear her over the windstorm?
And would he care?
As if thinking about it were enough to affect it, the wind died down and then stopped entirely. The car was essentially stationary, from what Annmarie could see through the windows, but they were probably eight or nine stories up in the air. If whoever had a hold of them let go, they were going into the ground in the worst of ways, engine first.
This might be the best chance she’d have to move around. She unbuckled again, climbing toward the back in a way that, without gravity to fight against, was weirdly like swimming. She slipped between the middle seats and into the back, where she turned and anchored herself between the twins. “Marisol, I want all of us in the backseat, okay? I’m going to hold you tight, and on the count of three, I want you to undo your seatbelt so I can pull you back here.” Marisol didn’t answer. “Mari, can you count for me?” She bent around the bucket seat, wrapping her arms around the little girl.
Beneath Annmarie’s elbow, Marisol’s heart beat frantically. “Okay,” she whispered. “One. Two. Three—”
Annmarie pulled. Marisol’s weightless form slid easily between the seats and into the back. Annmarie pushed her down onto the bench seat, murmuring, “Buckle in, buckle in now,” until Marisol got the belt across herself and snapped into place.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Annmarie repositioned herself. “Esteban, you’re next.”
“I know,” Esteban said quietly. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
Esteban unbuckled, and Annmarie hauled him into the back, adrenaline making her hyper-aware of his small form, the fragility of his bones, and the terrible distance between them and the ground below. When he was belted in, she turned, bracing her legs against the seats in front of her to push herself down between the kids while she located the center seatbelt and snapped it into place.
A knock at Marisol’s window had Annmarie all but jumping out of her skin. Marisol shrieked and squeezed over as far as she could, throwing her arms around Annmarie and hiding her face.
Annmarie put an arm around her even as she took Esteban’s hand in hers. He clutched it tightly. Outside the window, the black-suited arm pulled away. The car shook in a gust of wind as the man outside drifted far enough back that she could really see him.
He didn’t look like the devil incarnate. Villains most often didn’t, but somehow it was still a surprise to see a perfectly ordinary guy who was probably TJ’s age staring in through the window. His skin was tan, a shade somewhere between her own pale skin and TJ’s warm brown. Light eyes stared out at them from behind the black hood that came down to form a half-mask over his face. His dusty black costume had a circular white band around the center of his chest, strands of white branching out from it in a spiral, and the center of the circle was pitch black.
A black hole, she realized. Or rather, a singularity.
The car shook again, and he peeled his hood back as a draft blew him closer. He couldn’t be anyone else but the twins’ father. Marisol had his cheekbones, and Esteban the shape of his eyes. His straight, light brown hair, cut short, had lost out to TJ’s dark curls in his children, but they both had his chin. He knocked on the window again.
“It’s Daddy,” Esteban whispered.
“Yes,” Annmarie said softly. “Marisol, I’m going to reach past you and crack the window, okay?”
“No!” Marisol said without lifting her head. “I don’t want him to come in!”
Me either.
“I know, Mari, but he can’t come in through that window. It’s too little. Maybe he just wants to talk.” Annmarie hoped so—it would buy them more time for TJ to ride in with the cavalry.
Mari shook her head fiercely.
“Mari, Esteban,” Annmarie said gently, “if I don’t open the window, he might break it so he can talk to us. I don’t want you covered in glass, so I’m going to open it now. You don’t have to look at him, Mari, you can stay right where you are.”
Mari sobbed, but she nodded. Esteban squeezed Annmarie’s hand. Annmarie reached past her trembling charge to pop the back window open two inches.
“Thank you,” Singularity said in a pleasant tenor voice that didn’t sound evil. “Are you the new girlfriend?”
Talk about questions Annmarie really couldn’t answer right now. “I’m the nanny,” she all but growled, finding familiar ground in what she chose to do, even as they all floated in midair. “And you are terrifying the kids. Put us down.”
Singularity used something—a door handle, probably—to pull himself farther up the car where he could see the entire backseat. His face softened, and he drifted back over, gripping the frame of the rearmost window to stop himself. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s okay, kids, it’s just me. Don’t cry, Mari—Daddy’s here.”
Marisol tried to crawl farther into Annmarie’s lap without undoing her seatbelt. “Don’t let him touch me!” she gasped.
Annmarie bent farther over her and glared at Singularity’s stricken face. “What part of ‘terrifying’ did you not understand?”
He frowned then, his eyes darkening with an emotion she couldn’t identify. Sorrow? Anger?
“Marisol, Esteban, it’s just me. I know you don’t remember me, but I’m your father, and I would never hurt you. God, you look so much like Terry, it’s incredible.”
Beside her, Esteban leaned around Annmarie so he could see Singularity. “Can we go on the ground, then?”
The confusion on Singularity’s face would’ve been hilarious under other circumstances. Like on solid ground, with heavy bars between him and them and with that superpowers-inhibiting field they used at Peacekeeper. “What?” he asked.
Esteban swallowed. “If you’re not going to hurt us, put us down, please. It’s scary up here.”
Singularity shook his head, definitely sad-faced now. “I’m sorry, Esteban. Before I put you down, I have to make sure your nanny isn’t going to do something silly like try to run away with you. But you’re safe, I promise—I’m the one holding us all up, and I would never let you fall. You and your sister are coming home with me.” He smiled, not so much happy as hopeful. “We’re going to be a family, the way we were always supposed to be. I have ni
ce rooms for you already, and later we can move into a house—any house you want.”
“I want to go home,” Marisol announced, never moving her head from Annmarie’s lap. “I want to go to our real home. I want Mama!”
Esteban leaned back in his seat. “We have a home,” he said loudly. “We don’t want you to take us away from Mama. She says you do bad things.”
Singularity’s expression went pained. “Your mother doesn’t understand, is all. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but I can see it’s going to take some time for you to get used to the idea. You’re coming with me now, kids, and maybe we’ll talk about visiting Mama later.”
Mari cried more loudly, and Esteban said, “I’m scared, Annmarie.”
“You’re not taking them,” Annmarie said—not that she had any idea how she was going to make that stick. Just keep him talking, keep him busy, anything to hold him off while TJ gets here.
Singularity shook his head, as if they were having a perfectly reasonable conversation on the ground. In a park, maybe, or after dinner. “How exactly are you going to stop me?”
Annmarie glared. “I’ll think of something. You can’t have them. They’re their own people, I don’t care if they’re seven. You don’t own them, and you can’t just take them like they don’t have any say in the matter!”
He frowned and drew the hood down to mask his face again. “I’m their father.”
“That’s an accident of genetics. I work with kids for a living, and I can already tell you’d make a lousy parent.” It occurred to Annmarie, in a distant sort of way, that she probably shouldn’t make him angry. But dammit, she was sick to death of so-called parents who weren’t worth the name traumatizing their kids and claiming they had some kind of divine right. And this one wanted to take her kids? The ones she’d promised to take care of? “I’ve only known them for four days, and they’re more my kids than they are yours.”
It was harder to read his expression with the mask on, but Annmarie saw his jaw tighten with anger. He propelled himself forward along the car again, catching hold of the back door handle. She heard him trying the door, but the doors had all locked automatically after she’d started driving. In a minute, it would dawn on him that he could break the window. She swallowed and wrapped her arm around Esteban so she could hold both twins close. TJ, I need you. We need you.
After trying the front door too, Singularity returned to the door by the middle seats. Bracing himself by holding onto the luggage rack, he drew his legs up to his chest. Those heavy black boots would make short work of the glass.
A figure in yellow streaked along the right side of the car, slamming into Singularity and knocking him away. Annmarie patted Marisol’s side, breathing deeply with relief. “You can sit up now, Mari. Mama’s here.”
Chapter Nine
It had been TJ’s bright idea not to know where exactly Annmarie was taking the kids so no one could pickpocket her brain, but she knew the general direction, and she wasn’t waiting around for the rest of her team. Mad Mulligan and Vincy were still cursing her roundly for taking off without coordinates. She ignored them—this was her kids and Annmarie they were talking about. When the GPS data came, she was already close.
As soon as she was sure that black speck in the air wasn’t a figment of her imagination, her heart crept into her throat. By the time she was close enough that she could see the SUV and Singularity clearly, he was already trying to get into the car. She put on an additional burst of speed and barreled into him. “Jon, you son of a bitch! Put them down!” TJ kept her arms wrapped around his ribs like they were dancing. No way in hell was she letting go, not when he could increase the gravity field around her until she couldn’t stay in the air anymore.
“They’re not in any danger! Jesus, Terry—I hate the way you blow things out of proportion.” He squirmed, trying to break her grip without any leverage. She reinforced her hold, grappling with her mind more than her arms, and he gave up, merely twisting around until he faced her.
“Put…them…down.” Judging by the apparent size of the police cars below, they had to be better than fifty yards up, and TJ’s inner eye could visualize all too well what a fall from that height would do to those precious little bodies.
He rolled his eyes. “Let go of me and maybe I will.”
TJ laughed bitterly. “Hanging on to you is the only reason you haven’t upped the gravity and smashed me into street pizza, just like you holding the car hostage is the only reason I don’t telekinetically strangle you or rip through your ribcage till I find that lump of coal you’re passing off as a heart. How’d you get up here, anyway? You don’t fly without somebody to give you a boost.”
Singularity chuckled, and she was struck by the difference between this laugh and Jon’s laugh, the one that used to warm her insides and set her mind at ease. She’d known he was going bad when she’d followed him to the Udvar-Hazy Center and turned him in, but she’d put a man into prison, and a villain had come out.
“Meet my partner, Updraft,” he said, pointing behind her and to her left. She risked glancing that direction just long enough to see a blue-costumed figure floating maybe twenty-five yards away. “The Iron Fist was appropriately grateful for my help with the escape. It didn’t take much persuasion for them to allow us to take on a personal mission.”
She shrugged. In the lack of gravity, it rubbed their bodies together. There was a time that would have set her nerves alight in the best possible way. Now all it did was make that irritating sound of spandex rubbing against spandex. “Put us all down, okay? You take us in softly, I’ll hang on to you and stop levitating, and we can argue about this like civilized people.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so, hon. I can see plenty of cops down there, and as soon as that car isn’t floating, they’ve got no reason not to shoot me. They think I’ve just endangered civilians—that’s what landed me in Peacekeeper, after all. Theft, even on the scale of that Blackbird, would have kept me in D.C., but by the time we took hostages at Dulles, they called it endangerment, and that got me Peacekeeper. It was never endangering, or it wouldn’t have been if you and the other heroes had just stayed away. But no, you had to go stick your nose—”
“You’re monologuing.”
He shook his head, unfazed, his eyes gone soft and sad. “The cops won’t understand that this is about my kids. Terry, how could you? I sent cards, I wrote letters. I thought you might at least bring them to visit. Instead, I find that not only do they not know me, they’re afraid of me? What did you do to them?” His wounded tone was almost worse than his words.
She bristled. “My name is TJ, thanks. When you went rogue, I had to figure out who I was without you. I left Terry behind six years ago. And all I ever did was tell them the truth.”
“That I’m evil?” he said sharply. “Is that what you think?”
“That you do the wrong things, because no matter how smart you are, you have rotten judgment.” God, it was like all those arguments in their last months together, all over again. Hadn’t he learned anything in six years? What else was there to do in prison? “When Annmarie asked, I told her your problem was megalomania. There’s more than one right way, Jon, and most especially, there’s more than just your way.”
“Annmarie, huh? That’s your little girlfriend?”
If she hadn’t been so focused on the kids, his belittling tone would have made her see red. But she couldn’t afford to lose her cool. She couldn’t lift that car on her own, and her backup was at least a minute or two behind her. Maybe she should have let him ramble his egocentric way down memory lane after all, but she was sure she could hold him long enough—did she really have to listen to that bullshit? “And what if she is?”
A rough wind licked around them, as if trying to separate them. Singularity raised his eyes heavenward, like she was the exasperating one. “Terry, she
doesn’t even have any powers. She’s useless. Why would you want someone like that around our kids?”
His tone was so reasonable, she wondered if he’d always been this blind. She’d loved him once. Had everything she’d fallen in love with been a lie? “She’s a better parent than you are,” she said softly. “She’s great with the kids, and I think maybe I love her.”
Singularity’s eyes went hot, then, sudden rage apparent despite his mask. “She’s not their parent. I’m their parent.”
* * *
“What are they doing?” Marisol wondered.
“I think they’re talking.” Annmarie watched out the window as Singularity and Dynama tumbled and spun in the wind which had suddenly picked up around the two of them.
“Why are they doing that?” Marisol asked. “Why doesn’t she just make him put us down?”
On her other side, Esteban stirred. Annmarie saw too much wisdom on his face, and his mouth opened to say something. She caught his eye, and he closed it again.
Bad enough that he’d figured out TJ couldn’t lift them, because if she could, she’d have forced them down by now. Annmarie didn’t need either of the twins realizing that Daddy could drop them at any moment, and Mama couldn’t risk that happening. Whether he’d really do it or not. “I don’t know, Mari. We’re too far away to hear. But Mama is protecting you. Mama will always protect you, and so will I.”
* * *
The winds played around TJ and Singularity, spinning and twirling them so rapidly TJ had to close her eyes so she didn’t get sick. She hoped they were far enough from the car that the gusts wouldn’t affect it.
“Updraft is getting impatient,” Singularity said into her ear. “He has strict orders not to let you distract me long enough for help to arrive.”
“Swell. Look, this can be about you and me. Yeah, I turned you in. Be as mad as you want. Just put the kids down.” TJ hoped her backup was getting enough of this to know what they were walking into. She didn’t dare try to drop more specific hints. Who knew what Singularity would do if he caught on?