by Sevan Paris
“Okay!” I raised my hands. “I’ll get it. Just—just stop.”
The sizzling grew louder. “I’m waiting.”
I slowly walked over to the pile of dolls and, after some shoving and kicking them out of the way, bent over to pick up the bone. I turned and held it out in my open palm.
“Finally.” Dark Light released the man’s throat, and he fell to the ground with a grunt. Dark Light reached out for the phalanx, cheeks raised into a grin. The blobs inside his body moved faster, as if they were excited by what was about to happen. His fingertips brush my palm …
Gabe, what are you doing?
I latch onto Dark Light’s wrist, widening his eyes. “Accepting responsibility.”
Yanking him with me, I flew through the ceiling.
Several heartbeats later, we were in the clouds. “Let go of me!” Dark Light said. He pushed and pulled against me, both with his arms and legs, but my grip was solid, determined. He tried shooting me with some of that yellow energy stuff next, but I kept his hand pointed away, sending the blasts harmlessly into the sky.
Space opened up around us.
Gabe, if you’re doing what I think you’re doing … it isn’t going to work.
“It can if you put a piece of yourself in that thing. Permanently.”
I said that I couldn’t do—
“Can’t or won’t?”
I know what you’re thinking, and it may very well work! But you don’t know the cost!
We passed the Moon on our left side. Dark Light tried to fly away from me, but I just jerked him closer. “I know what the alternative is!”
I slowed down a little, giving Dark Light the chance to press his feet against my chest.
FINE, FINE! Just don’t let go! And you’d better be right about this. Because if you’re not—
“If I’m not, we’re not gonna be alive for you to bitch about it!”
After hearing a reluctant sigh in my head, a blue cloud of energy—just like what I saw rush at my face days ago—formed on my skin and rolled down my arm. It left me and clung to the phalanx in Dark Light’s fist.
I turned and let go of Dark Light, letting momentum carry him farther into space, past the dark side of the Moon. He clung to the bone with both hands and watched as the blue cloud entered it. The small piece of Sequoyah’s finger glowed with new power.
I guess Dark Light thought that I had given up, that I just came to the conclusion there was no way to beat him. Or maybe he actually was delusional enough to think that I finally agreed with him—the world would be a better place if a billion or so people died to prove his theory. His chest seemed to swell with sick joy, knowing that he had everything he needed now … knowing that not even Liberty could stop him.
Then, with a violent flash of light, space ripped open behind him.
Dark Light turned and watched as three of the Sentinel’s tendrils slowly reached out of the tear, searching for the piece of M that it sensed nearby. It braced ten more twitching tentacles on either side of the opening, as if it were pulling on an invisible wall to free itself from its inter-dimensional nest. A dark cloud with flickering blue lights rushed out and then parted, showing two glowing red eyes.
The eyes fell on Dark Light.
All of the tentacles—even the ones bracing the horrid thing—suddenly wrapped around Dark Light’s chest and legs. Dark Light, to his credit, didn’t hesitate to fire blast after blast of energy at the thing. The cloud merely parted farther, exposing a circular maw of moving teeth. Dark Light raised his arms as the creature quickly shoved him into its mouth whole. One last burst of yellow energy came out of the Sentinel’s mouth before it slid back into its nest and the tear sealed behind it.
And then after a wink of white light, any sign of the Sentinel or Dr. Silas Thatcher disappeared forever.
EPILOGUE
Pink hovers above the couch in Casa’s living room, blinking at me. “So … I don’t get it. What was the thing M gave up?”
My life. What little of it I had left it anyway.
I lean against the fireplace mantle, feeling the warmth of the fire through my jeans. “We, back then, we could use the Grav Blasts, force fields, Grav Beams—everything—indefinitely. But now our powers have to recharge. Each time we use them—depending on how long or how intense—it sucks up a little bit of that charge.”
“Where does the recharge come from?”
“Same thing that keeps M’s incorporeal self from slipping away: My nervous system. I don’t exactly understand how or why.”
Certainly not for lack of my trying to explain …
“But,” I say, “because of the way it works—our symbioses became irreversible for me. My nervous system depends on him as much as he depends on it. Before Thatcher, M could have survived for a while outside of a human body. Now it’s just a matter of seconds. Aside from Reagan, he hasn’t found anybody else he was compatible with. And since Reagan rejected him …”
“He’s stuck with you,” Pink says, floating away from the couch. “I remembered the stuff at Northshore Mall too. As you were talking about it, I remembered HEROES receiving the calls, but by the time we got there, it was over with.”
“I was wondering why none of you guys showed up. We were there for a while.”
Pink shrugs. “We had our hands full with some Norse Mythology crap at the time. Silver Sentinel said something about checking the footage from everything later, but it was static-y. I guess whatever was messing with M’s senses messed with the cameras too. What about Jessica? How’d you convince her to let you keep your job?”
“It took some smooth talking, but we eventually came to an agreement.”
There was nothing remotely smooth about it. It was ninety hours of free labor.
A long silence passes.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “You never took the oath.”
“The what?”
“The HEROES oath. You bothered to memorize it but you never said it? Even to yourself?”
“Well, I don’t know. I forgot about it before … Dark Light. And after, it obviously wasn’t relevant.”
“Obviously.” She gives me a wide smile, making her look even more like a kid than when she actually looked like a kid. “Let’s make up a new one.”
“You mean right now?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It seems …”
Pointless? Asinine?
“Unnecessary,” I say.
She puts her hand on her hip. “If that story is unnecessary, why have you been spending the last two hours telling me about it?”
“Okay. Okay, again I get your point.”
“Darn tootin’ you do. You start.”
“I—”
“Wait, don’t you know anything about oaths, Garrison? You gotta stand up-right. Respectable like. Like you’re about to look life right in the eye and say—” she twists her pink face up into a mean look—“Do somethin.’ ”
I smile. For the first time, I can think about those days—those awful, awful days—with a perspective that doesn’t make me feel like my soul just got crotch-punched. I think—I hope—that telling the story will help Pink. But I know for a fact it’s helped me.
“Okay,” I clear my throat. “I, Galaxy …” I look at her, and she nods in approval. “Swear to always be … hero-y?”
We snort out a laugh. The laugh turns into a chuckle, then gives way to silence.
“What is it?” she says through a grin.
“What’s what?”
“You’re looking at me funny.”
“I … ”
There is a loud knock on Casa’s front door.
“I’m gonna …” I point at the wooden door.
“Yeah, I’m going upstairs. Think the enjoyable company of others is still far from enjoyable.” She floats up the steps and then turns back. “If you have to leave, will you see me before? If I can, and you need me, I wanna help.” She shrugs. “With whatever.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay sure.”
My hand goes to the doorknob and—after a brief moment of hesitation—I open the door.
“Hi,” Ember says, pulling back her hood.
Finally! Someone is here that we CAN have sex with!
“Hi,” I step aside.
We navigate through the maze of book stacks in the living room. Ember looks around the way people do when they’re first seeing the inside of another person’s life. Her eyes widen when she sees five bottles of bourbon on the fireplace mantle, two of which are empty.
“This isn’t my place. This is someone else’s place.”
She grins. “Yeah, I got that from the ‘it’s not my place’ part.”
“Sorry, long day. Ember, I’m sorry that I … that I—”
She crosses the room and folds her arms. “Broomed me?”
My face warms.
Wait, there are things we can do with brooms?
“I, no. I well, is that what … ”
She laughs. “Relax, cowboy. I’m just giving you a hard time. I wasn’t expecting anything other than what it was. But still, it would have been fun to get back together. God knows I could have used it.”
USE US! USE US!
She pulls her brightly dyed red hair away from her eyes; they constantly flick around the room.
“Are you okay? You sounded like you had the worst kind of wiggins on the phone. And you seem way edgey now.”
She nods. “We think we’ve found Macabre. And we think that we know how to stop him.”
“We?”
“Mystick and some other Sayers.”
“You’re working with her? That’s unexpected.”
“Not as unexpected as us finding him.” She puts her hands in the pockets of her black hoodie. “He’s been so careful for years. Why would he slip up now? Unless he wants us to find him. Which means he’s ready for some kind of end of the world scenario.”
I shrug. “Which means we’ll stop him.”
Ember shakes her fiery head. “How do you do it? How are you so confident? In spite of everything?”
“I never really thought of it as confident.”
More like delusional.
“More like a choice that I don’t have,” I say. “At the end of the day, this is what I am; this is what I do. No point in taking the time to dwell on it. Guess that makes me more than a little hopeless.”
She gives me a hollow grin. “I guess.” Her eyes moisten, and she reaches out to hug me. Not knowing what exactly is going on, not knowing exactly what to do or say, I hug back. Our cheeks press against Ember’s hot tear.
Gabe … I’m not sensing … anything.
“What?” I say.
My senses just went blind. I can’t sense her, I can’t sense anything outside. And I can’t sense any power in us. It’s like she’s cutting it off from us somehow.
“I’m sorry,” Ember says. And then she squeezes into the back of my neck, pulling my throat into her collar bone.
Cutting off my airway.
Something escapes my mouth, like the combination of a gurgle and a gasp. She squeezes harder and we both slam into the the mantle. The bourbons tumble off, crashing onto the hardwood floor. Ember wraps her muscled legs around my midsection, firmly hanging on. I catch the glimpse of something glowing green below her stomach.
It’s that jewel she has affixed to her belt, Gabe! It’s what’s cutting off our powers! You have to get it away from her! Quickly!
I try to force my hands between us, but she tightens her limbs around me like an anaconda. I push away from the mantle, sending us through a stack of books and onto the floor. Ember lets go and—right when I think I’ll have a chance to get out from under her—she slides her left leg under my neck and presses her right knee against my throat.
I hear the sound of a breaking window from upstairs, followed by shuffling feet.
“Wh—” I wheeze and tried again—“why are you doing this … to me?” I reach up, trying to shove her off.
She grabs my wrists and turns them, jarring pain all the way through my body. I try to scream, but her knee presses even harder. “I’m sorry—I’m so, so sorry. But it’s not about you.”
Pink screams.
Ember’s irises flame up. “Macabre’s spell … from five years ago. It left him open to Pink. The only way we know that we can hurt him is through her. The process is … I’m sorry Gabe.” She scoots her leg away from under my neck.
Gabe, now! The belt! Grab the belt!
I have one finger on the glowing buckle before Ember grabs a fistful of my hair. She grits her teeth and slams my head against the hardwood.
The last thing I hear before the world goes black is Pink screaming my name.
SUPERHEROES IN PROSE WILL RETURN IN 30 DAYS (WHAT-WHAT?) WITH VOLUME EIGHT: MAGIC WITH A C