What could be taking him so long? I wondered.
I crossed the hallway to the ladies’ room and pushed open the door. It was a single-stall bathroom, the kind where the door opens right into the toilet and sink area. No stalls and minimal privacy.
The men’s room is probably the same.
Checking over my shoulder to make sure nobody was about to catch me doing something very odd, I crept to the men’s room door and rested my ear against it. It was hard to hear anything above the thumping rhythm of the live band. Frowning, I tried to force my ear to focus on the other side of the thin wooden door. I heard something—water?—or maybe it was nothing. Maybe the guy had eaten a whole plate of nachos and was paying the price. Maybe he’d be a half hour in there.
Just as I was about to retreat back to my barstool, someone grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Ian was standing in front of me, digging his fingers into my collarbone. His black eyes were on fire, and two red spots burned on his cheeks.
“What the hell are you doing?” he growled.
“What?” My mind raced, grasping for any kind of plausible reason I could be mashing my face against the men’s room door, but I came up empty. My mouth just opened and closed like a fish struggling to breathe out of water, and my shoulder ached where he gripped it.
“Come on.”
Ian yanked me down the hall and shoved me through the door marked emergency exit only. We spilled out into an alley that ran the length of the bar before dead-ending at a large green dumpster and a brick wall. At the far end, traffic passed by on Blackfin Street.
He pushed me up against the dumpster. “Time to cut the shit, little girl. Who are you, really? Bruce doesn’t have a sister.”
I tried to sidestep out from between him and the cold metal dumpster, but he kept a hold of the front of my blouse. I succeeded only in squirming. “I told you, I’m his sister-in-law.”
“Is that a fact? He never mentioned you to me.” Ian looked me up and down, then made a clucking sound. “And if I wasn’t already pissed at that guy, I would be now. You’re something else.”
“Look, I don’t know what you want, but I just need to find him, okay?”
“I told you before, kid. I can’t help you. Bruce ran out on a debt, and if I knew where he was, I’d be there to collect it.”
His grip was tightening on my shirt, and the fabric was starting to strain around my ribcage. Between that and his bar breath, I was more than a little uncomfortable.
“If you don’t know where he is,” I said, “then what are we doing out here? Why don’t I just go home?”
Ian shook his head slowly. “Too late, little girl. You should’ve left when I told you to. But you just had to stay and start poking around.” He brought his face close to mine, so close that our noses nearly touched. “And you’ll wish you’d gone home. Believe me. I won’t hurt the merchandise, but once you’ve been sold, they will.”
My eyes widened. Merchandise? They? I had no idea what he was talking about, and my gut told me I didn’t want to know. My knees began to buckle, and I started sinking toward the ground.
Ian grabbed my hair with his other hand and jerked me upward. My scalp burned, and I cried out in pain. I’d never had my hair pulled that hard in my life. He spun me around and pushed me up against the dumpster again. He pressed his body into my back, and I felt his hot breath against my ear.
“Can’t sell you ’til I’ve tested you first though, right? Gotta make sure you’re quality.”
He snaked a hand around my waist and tugged at my skirt, and my body locked up. His words snapped together in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle, and I finally saw the full picture. I knew what he was about to do. And after he was done, he was going to sell me. Sell me, like a collectible figurine.
For a moment, I saw myself as I’d been just weeks ago. Fragile. Tired. Scared. That version of me would give up. She’d go lay down in a clearing in the cold and wait for death to take her.
Maybe death did come, I thought. Because I’m not that girl anymore.
My bare hands were pressed against the dirty metal of the dumpster. Ignoring the feeling of Ian’s hands on my body, I focused on the cold. It was sharp and unyielding, and I was close enough to it to smell the steel. I sucked the metal up into both of my hands, curling my fingers into tight fists before they hardened. I watched them turn the same faded green as the dumpster in front of me, and once they solidified, I moved.
I brought my hands downward and punched behind my back, blindly striking out toward where I thought his midsection might be. My left fist went wide, but my right connected with something soft, sinking into it. I heard Ian yelp, and his weight lifted from my body.
Spinning around to face him, I pulled my fists back again. My form was sloppy, and I had no idea what I was doing, but adrenaline had taken over. My heart screamed “Punch!” with every beat, and I obeyed, sending my fists toward him with wild abandon. Most of my punches sliced through the air between us, but several connected. His chest. His groin. And just as I’d managed to back him toward the bar’s emergency exit door, my right fist—now a mound of cold, hard steel—slammed into his jaw. It cracked, loudly enough that I could hear it though the pumping rhythm of the music from inside the bar, and Ian stumbled backward before falling to the ground in a heap.
I stood over him and panted. My pulse roared in my ears and burned in my veins, and I pulled my right fist back again. He was down, but I could tell he wasn’t out. He’d get up any second and come at me, and this real-life version of button mashing might not work twice.
“Hey!” a voice shouted from the Blackfin Street. “What’s going on down there?”
I jerked my head up. A few dozen yards away, several smokers were walking down the alleyway toward me.
Shit. I backed away from Ian, toward the dumpster. How would this look? Would they believe I was just defending myself? There wasn’t a scratch on me—he must’ve meant it when he said he wouldn’t leave any marks—but he was bruised and bleeding. I glanced down at my hands and willed them to go back to normal. I couldn’t afford to let anyone see me, not like this. In desperation, I scanned the alley, looking for anywhere to hide.
There was nothing. I was screwed.
“Head’s up!” someone called from above.
I jerked my head upward just in time to see something thin and brown sailing toward my face. With a squeak of surprise, I dove to the side. A long piece of rope hung limply beside me. I followed it up the brick wall with my eyes; it went all the way to the roof.
“Grab it!” the voice yelled.
There was no time to think. The smokers were closing in on me; any second now, they’d be close enough to see my face. It was them or the roof. With a final glance at Ian’s limp form on the ground, I wrapped the rope around my hands.
“Now what?” I called up to the roof.
“Hold on!”
I felt him pulling up on the rope and tightened my grip around it. As he hauled me upward, I tried to keep myself from scraping along the brick wall, but it was all I could do to hang on. This was testing muscles I hadn’t used since the Flexed Arm Hang exercise in high school gym class, and I’d never been particularly good at that in the first place. I was traveling upward faster than I would’ve thought possible, and by the time the people below me reached Ian, I was being pulled onto the roof of the warehouse next to the bar, where I collapsed onto all fours.
A heavy hand rested on my shoulder. I lifted my head, and time seemed to stop.
I was face to face with The Fox.
After so many days of painting and drawing his face, it was surreal to be seeing it in real life. It almost felt wrong, like the versions I’d authored were the truth, and he was an imposter. But I knew that wasn’t the case. He was real, and he was standing right in front of me.
As impressive as his costume had been in the grainy security camera footage, it was stunning in person. He was clad head to toe in some kind of black stretchy fabric that see
med to fade into the night sky behind him. And then there was the mask. Brown and black, it covered everything from his neck up and was topped by a pair of tall, pointed ears.
He tilted his head—just his head; the rest of his body stayed perfectly still—and narrowed his dark eyes. “Are you all right?”
For a moment, I forgot how to make words. The connection between my brain and my mouth had been severed the instant I’d realized his mask’s ears had little tufts of black fur sticking out of them, and it took several seconds before I even remembered how to breathe.
Finally, the connection snapped back into place and my voice returned.
“I think so,” I croaked. I struggled to my feet and checked myself. My short skirt had done nothing to protect my legs from the rough brick; I had long, ugly scrapes down my thighs and shins. My hands burned where the rope had pulled against them.
“Good. Come on. We need to get out of here.”
The Fox took off running along the roof, heading away from Bilgewater and toward the waterfront. After a moment spent stupidly asking myself if this was really happening, then another moment deciding that it really was, I followed, stumbling along behind him as quickly as I could. The footing was difficult; the roof was flat, but it was covered in small pebbles, and my high heels kept catching on them.
I stripped them off and immediately regretted the decision. As I ran after The Fox, the rough stones dug into my feet. My heels stung; it felt like acupressure gone wrong.
My pace slowed down, and The Fox pulled away from me. After the distance between us had grown to several yards, he glanced back over his shoulder, skidded to a stop, and headed back toward me.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked.
Without waiting for a response, he scooped me up into a fireman’s carry and began running again. His pace startled me. Even carrying me, he was moving much more quickly than he’d been before. The edge of the roof loomed, and lights of the wharf twinkled in the empty space beyond it.
We were running out of rooftop.
The Fox tightened his grip on me. “Hold on!”
He wasn’t slowing down. If anything, he was speeding up, lengthening his stride with each step. Like a fool, I clutched at the sleek black fabric he was covered in, despite suddenly wanting very much for him to put me down. I knew what was coming, and I wanted no part of it.
The Fox stepped onto the raised lip at the edge of the roof, bent down, and sprung into the air. We sailed out into nothingness.
You guessed it. I screamed.
Then we landed. The Fox stumbled slightly, but he was still running as though jumping down two stories was nothing more than skipping the last two steps on a staircase. He kept going, racing down the backs of the shipping warehouses around us until we reached a tall box truck that was tucked into another alley. He stopped beside it and set me down on the concrete.
I leaned against the side of the truck and gulped in the salty sea air.
“Are you crying?” he asked.
“No.”
But as I touched my face, I realized my cheeks were wet. I wasn’t sure if my eyes were watering from the speed, or if I was so glad to be on solid ground and standing still again that I was weeping with joy. I started to laugh, and the noise echoed off the silent fronts of the warehouses and mingled with the sound of crashing waves.
“Maybe,” I told him. “I don’t know.”
“Well, you can figure it out inside.”
He slid up the cargo door on the back of the truck and helped me inside, where I promptly collapsed into an exhausted heap on the bare plywood floor. It was the kind of truck people might rent when they’re moving into a new house, but this one opened up at the front to the cab. The Fox climbed in behind me, sliding the door closed. As soon as the latch clicked home, I was in darkness and silence.
I was alone, locked in the back of a truck with a stranger, and nobody knew where I was.
My heart began to pound. What had I done? I didn’t know this guy. Maybe the police chief was right. Maybe The Fox wasn’t anything more than a criminal himself. I’d barely managed to escape from Ian in the alley. Was I supposed to fight off The Fox, too?
He made no moves toward me, instead climbing into the driver’s seat, starting the engine, and pulling slowly out into the street. I was puzzled by his low speed as we cruised through the shipping district. If I was behind the wheel, I would’ve driven as fast as possible to put as much distance between myself and Bilgewater as I could. I didn’t ask any questions though. Instead, I sat in silence and turned my fists back into the green metal of the dumpster, just in case I needed them again.
The Fox drove us toward downtown, but instead of heading straight on to the commercial district he turned onto Triton, then onto Palaemon. He stopped the truck right in front of Helena’s Place and turned off the ignition.
“Okay, Tess,” he said, sliding out of the driver’s seat and hunching to come back into the cargo space. “You’re home.”
My hackles sprang up, and I backed toward the rear of the truck. How the hell does he know that?
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
“Because we’ve met.”
“We have?”
“You really don’t know who I am?”
I shook my head, genuinely perplexed.
He raised a hand and pushed his mask up and over his head, revealing a square jaw and deep, chocolate brown eyes. It was a face I knew, one that’d been trying to force itself into my mind all day long. The second I saw it, the metal faded from my hands, leaving me clenching nothing more than ordinary fists.
“Reed?” I spoke his name in a whisper. “You’re The Fox?”
He nodded.
“I don’t… I can’t believe it.”
He gestured at his mask, now discarded on the floor in front of me. “Believe it.”
“But you’re…” I stared at him, unsure how to form the question that had fascinated me even more than The Fox’s identity. “Did you have the Solstice Syndrome?”
Reed sank down to sit cross-legged beside me on the plywood. “I knew you were smart. So you figured it out, huh?”
I nodded slowly. “It was the only thing that made sense. Then when I saw Maggie Long on the news, I knew I was right. How did you know?”
“When I saw your chart. And first, there was this.”
He pulled off his gloves and picked up my right hand, pressing his palm against mine. Despite anticipating it, I was still startled by the jolt that burned through my skin where he touched it, as though he was made of something white-hot. I snatched my hand away and hugged my arms to my chest.
“And I’ve seen the way you can change,” he said.
“How long were you watching me in that alley?” I said.
He shook his head. “That’s not the first time I’ve seen it, Tess. I saw you on the train. The way your hand became like that metal stanchion.”
I thought back to the day we’d met on the Fishbone. He’d seemed so absorbed in his phone; I’d been sure he hadn’t seen me. But he had. He’d seen everything, yet said nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“You were spooked. I could tell. So…” He looked down at his own hands. “I followed you. Again.”
“Again?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Listen, I know this is a lot to take in. But just promise me you’ll try to keep an open mind, okay?”
For the umpteenth time that night, I found myself without words. Reed apparently took my lack of an argument as a sign of my agreement, and the story began to tumble out of his mouth.
“That first day we met, in front of your apartment building? When you tripped and fell? You were right. I was following you.”
The power of speech returned to me. “Why? How did you even know who I was?”
“I didn’t. I was on my way to the train station on Triton, and I… I felt you. You were scared of something.”
He stared at me l
ike I was supposed to know what that meant. I didn’t, so I stared right back.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like…” He stared up at the truck’s ceiling like he was hoping an explanation would handily appear there. He kept his eyes glued to the rivets in the metal above us while he spoke. “It’s like people have a smell. Only not a smell, because it doesn’t feel like it’s my nose that picks up on it. It’s almost a taste, or a reflex or… It’s more just a gut feeling, I guess. And I know they need my help. But that wasn’t the only thing I sensed in you. I felt… a sameness.”
He locked eyes with me again, his face twisted into a pained expression.
“Is any of this making sense?” he asked.
“Honestly?”
His face fell, and I wished I’d been able to give him a different answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think I could explain what I’ve been going through, either.”
It was true. I hadn’t even been able to put a name to it, and each time I made myself change, I felt like I was operating on mostly instinct. If I ever had to describe it out loud to someone, to tell them the way my skin burned and tugged when I absorbed something, the way it was my skin and not my skin all at the same time… I’d end up sounding like a lot like Reed.
He leaned his head back again and groaned. “But I want to explain. I haven’t been able to tell a single person about it because they’d think I was crazy, and they’d lock me up or something. And then I saw you on Palaemon Street, and you… you…” He swallowed. “You felt like me.”
Something lurched in my stomach, and it took me a second to figure out why. I’d been assuming those little electric shocks I felt whenever Reed touched me were some kind of super-strong romantic spark. Instead, they were probably just the side effect of our shared weirdness, and he’d probably feel exactly those same sparks if he was touching Maggie Long or any other Solstice Syndrome survivor.
He lightly dragged a finger up the inside of my arm, and I shivered as tiny bursts of static electricity popped in the near-darkness.
“I’ve never felt that from anybody before. I had to know about you. So I followed you.” He dropped my arm. “I’m so sorry. I know it’s creepy.”
Solstice Survivors (Book 1): Superhero Syndrome Page 14