Solstice Survivors (Book 1): Superhero Syndrome

by Larrinaga, Caryn

  He glanced over at me, then turned his attention back to the road. “I’m curious,” he said. “What exactly are you picturing?”

  “Well, it’s a warehouse, right? So, I guess lots of levels and ramps, and about a hundred guys with guns standing between us and my sister.”

  He snorted, managing to pack a whole lot of judgment into one little piggy noise.

  “You watch too many action movies. Sure, these guys are going to have a lot of muscle, but we’re not going to rush in there, guns blazing. The Nightshades have gotten spoiled. They’re used to operating in the open. They have so much money and so many cops on their payroll, they don’t feel like they have to hide.”

  “How can you even know that? You didn’t even know their real names until half an hour ago.”

  “That was the only thing I didn’t know. I’ve been learning a lot of about them, about the shady underbelly in the south side. I used to think life was simple—go to work, have fun on the weekends, pay the bills. But there’s a whole other world out there—a world where people don’t play by the same rules normal people do. And now we’re a part of that world.”

  “‘We?’” I repeated. “Uh, newsflash: you and I aren’t exactly in the same league here. For one thing, you’ve got a costume.”

  “You really don’t think we’re the same? You decided to take the search for your sister into your own hands. The second you walked into Bilgewater with your insane plan to flirt information out of somebody, you became a vigilante.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t think that word applies to what I’m doing at all.”

  “Did you or did you not beat the holy hell out of Ian Nyx in an alley last night?”

  “That was self-defense.”

  “Okay, sure. I agree that if you hadn’t started throwing punches, you would’ve gotten hurt. Well, in a hypothetical alternate past when I wasn’t just about to dive off the building and strangle that guy to death.”

  “You were watching?”

  “Not all of it. It took me a few minutes to get out the front door of the bar, get into my costume, and circle around the block to climb onto the roof of that warehouse.”

  “You were in the bar?” My voice was shriller than I would’ve liked it to be.

  “I told you, I was watching you. Which is why I know you followed a Belladonna worker down the hall to the men’s room. What exactly were you planning to do to that poor guy? Turn your hands into steel and beat some answers out of him?”

  I stared at him, aghast. “No! I was… Well, I’m not sure what I was going to do. You said it earlier. Flirt for information.”

  “Right. Come on, Tess. If flirting didn’t work, and you were alone with that guy in the bathroom with your sister’s safety on the line…?” He trailed off, leaving the question hanging in the air, but didn’t push me to answer it.

  And I was glad. I really didn’t know what I was capable of, which was exactly why I wasn’t so hot on the idea of going into someplace where there were a whole lot of people who did know what they were capable of. The only stuff I knew about fighting came from comic books, and there tended to be a lot of “POW!” and “OOMPH!” callouts over the important stuff.

  But what was my alternative? Go home, feed Bear, and read about characters who were way braver than I dared to be? Wait for the cops to work it all out? Officer Duffy clearly thought Bethany and Bruce had just run off somewhere to work out their problems. And now that I knew about this other world, where women could just disappear and people could pay off cops to look the other way, I couldn’t go back to a regular life. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen behind the curtain.

  But I could follow Reed. I watched him, his stark features drawn together as he concentrated on the road over the dashboard, and something he said in the bunker came back to me.

  “Hey, was it true what you said back there? You’ve been searching for the missing girls for weeks?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  I chewed my lip, not sure I wanted to know the answer to the next question. But I needed to know. “Did you… did someone you care about go missing?”

  His flicked his eyes over at me for a brief second. “Not exactly.”

  I’m embarrassed to admit I was relieved. The teensiest part of me had been scared his wife or girlfriend had been taken.

  “Why, then?” I pushed. “Are you really just that noble?”

  “Would you find it hard to believe if I was?”

  Shrugging, I flicked a piece of lint off my armrest. “Not really. I could see it. But it makes me feel like a jackass. I’ve known about my powers for a couple weeks, and it didn’t occur to me to use them to find these girls until my sister became one of them, you know?”

  “My motives weren’t as noble as you might think.” He paused and pursed his lips. “The cops brought me in for questioning on the disappearances last month.”

  My jaw hit my shoes. “Seriously? Why?”

  “Three of the girls came through the ER the week before they went missing, and I administered their x-rays. They all came in for different reasons and saw different doctors, so I was the only connection the detectives could find.”

  “Are you still a suspect?”

  “Technically, yes. No alibi. So I started looking for the girls to clear my name. I don’t think I’m really a main suspect or anything because the cops haven’t come back to question me, but…”

  “Now it feels like the right thing to do,” I finished for him.

  “Yeah.” He glanced over at me again. “Make you feel better?”

  “Depends. Are you going to let me keep working with you?”

  He drove in silence for a few minutes, staring out at the road ahead of us. At last, he simply nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “So what makes you think we’ll find more answers at Bilgewater? It was a pretty solid dead-end for me last night.”

  “You said the worker you followed never came out of the bathroom, right? What if it’s not a bathroom? What if it’s an entrance to a whole separate kind of club?”

  Remembering what Ian had threatened to do to me in that alley, I shuddered. “Definitely possible.”

  “There’s a warehouse immediately behind Bilgewater that has signage claiming to be backup storage for Belladonna Seafood, which the Nyx brothers own, right? What if they’re keeping more than canned crab in there?”

  “You think that’s where all the kidnapped women are?”

  A pained look flashed across Reed’s face. “Not all of them. I think it’s a holding facility. At best, they probably keep their victims there a few days before shipping them off.”

  The bottom dropped out of my gut, and a hollowness filled the space where my stomach should’ve been. “A few days?”

  Bethany had been missing for two days. Reed knew it, and I could see the warning in his eyes. There was a chance we were already too late.

  I swallowed, forcing the sudden rush of grief back down. She could still be there. We have to try.

  “What do I need to do?”

  “I wish we had more time to prepare you, to teach you how to fight. But we need to get in there tonight, before… Well, before we lose any more time. So we need to work with what you’ve got. I saw what you did to Ian Nyx.”

  “Yeah, but that was pure adrenaline.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Do you think you’ll be calm when we’re facing down the Nightshades and their men?”

  Fair point. “Okay. So I just… let my instincts take over? Start throwing punches?”

  “No, I’m not saying that either. You have to think about your abilities. Don’t use your bare fists. You can absorb anything, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I mean, everything’s worked so far.”

  “We’ll be in a warehouse. There should be plenty of good, hard materials for you to morph into. Steel. Brick. Wood. Stay behind me. Follow my lead. We have the advantage of surprise. If we’re stealthy enough, nobody even has to get hurt.”


  He sounded so confident. I almost forgot that until the meteor shower, he’d just been a regular guy working a regular job in a hospital. Which Reed was the real version now? The one who wore scrubs or the one who ran around in a fox mask?

  For Bethany’s sake, I had to trust that it was the latter. After all, my powers had changed me. I was no longer the scared, dying girl who checked herself out of the Hudson Research Center. I was someone brave enough—or maybe stupid enough—to break into a warehouse in broad daylight hoping the local mafia was using it as a front for their illegal activities.

  Reed turned onto Blackfin Street, then pulled the truck into a space behind a stack of storage pods in a parking lot. He reached behind my seat, rummaged around in a box, and handed me a wad of black fabric.

  “Here,” he said. “It’s not much, but you need to hide your face, just in case they have cameras.”

  I pulled the fabric apart and realized it was a thinly knit ski mask with holes for my eyes, but none for my mouth. I frowned and wrinkled my nose.

  “I know, I know. It’s not as fashionable as mine.” Reed put on his own stylized mask with its tall fox ears. “But the important thing is nobody can track this back to us if we manage to make it out of there.”

  He made a valid point. I didn’t want the Nyx brothers coming after me. I pulled on the mask, trying to ignore the way it scratched at my face and made my breath feel too hot and too close.

  Reed cut the engine and slid out of the truck. “Let’s go get your sister.”

  The Bilgewater Lounge looked sad and desolate in the misty air of the morning. It’d been hours since last call. The loud music of the night before had been silenced, and the only sounds around us were the squawking of seagulls and the belch of a truck engine from down the street. Even Bear was quiet as he padded along beside me, his posture as protective as it’d been in Bruce’s bomb shelter.

  It was surreal, walking down the same alley where Ian Nyx had attacked me not even twelve hours before. It seemed like six lifetimes had happened since he’d pressed me against that green dumpster. I went down to the end of the alley to give the metal behemoth a pat.

  “Friend of yours?” Reed muttered.

  “You might say that.” I felt indebted to its rusty metal body for helping me save my fragile hide. I eyed the heavy metal door beside us, which had only a large deadbolt in place of a knob. “Are you going to pick the lock or something?”

  “No,” he said. “I noticed they have an alarm system when we were here yesterday. You can usually spot them—blinking red light on the wall opposite any staff door like this.”

  I thought back to the long minutes I’d spent in the hallway by the bathrooms, waiting for the Belladonna worker to re-emerge. I hadn’t even noticed a light.

  “What, then?”

  “Your old pal Oscar the Grouch is going to give us a boost.”

  “Oscar the Grouch lived in a garbage can. He wasn’t a dumpster.”

  “Close enough. Come here.”

  He crouched down slightly, interlacing his fingers to make a foothold for me, and helped me clamber onto the dumpster’s sloping plastic lid. Beside me, the narrow window from the men’s room at Bilgewater hung slightly open, the pane of glass angled upward away from the building. Even in the still morning air, a terrible odor wafted out from the toilet below us. The stench of the aftermath of bar nachos and beer—ejected from both ends of drunk dock and cannery workers—managed to squeeze its way through the thin layer of polyester that protected my mouth and nose. I retched and reflexively pulled on my little black knit gloves.

  “Good idea.” Reed lifted his own gloved hands and flexed his fingers. “No prints.”

  “Gross,” I said. “I was picturing it being a hallway or something, not an actual, working bathroom.”

  “Not every guy who comes in is going to the brothel or whatever they’ve got back there. They need a place for the legit customers to…” He rolled a hand in the air. “Well, you know.”

  “Reed, we’re about to commit a felony here. There’s no need for euphemisms.”

  I suspected he wanted to laugh at me, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he leapt into the air and landed softly on the dumpster lid beside me. Then he leaned down and pushed hard on the window frame, snapping it clean off at the hinges. He carefully lowered the window down to the ground, then looked at Bear.

  “Stay here, buddy. Howl if you see anyone, then run back to the truck, okay?”

  Bear stared up at him, panting softly. I didn’t know how the dog could understand a command that complicated, but Reed seemed to think his message had been received and noted.

  Reed turned back to me. “Ladies first.”

  As he grabbed my hands to lower me through the window, and his fingers grazed my exposed wrists, I focused on the pleasing electric pulse passing between us so I wouldn’t have to think about the fact that I was putting my brand-new shoes onto the seat of a toilet where guys like Bruce would rest their cans. Reed came in after me. Feet first, he slipped through the window, twisting in mid-drop to let each of his shoulders through the small opening. He landed lightly, his combat boots barely slapping the wet floor. Then he pulled open the stall door, and we stepped into the men’s room.

  It looked like a normal bathroom to me, with two wide stalls across from a row of three urinals. I found it disgusting that there was no sink, but didn’t think there was anything suspicious about the place. Reed had keener observational skills than me and kicked in the door to the second stall, which sat in the corner of the room. A narrow wooden door marked “Private” was set into the yellow-tiled wall, next to the toilet paper dispenser.

  Reed raised an eyebrow at me. “Does that look like a normal place to put a storage closet or something?”

  I shook my head. He pressed his ear against the door, closed his eyes, and listened for a few moments. He tried the doorknob.

  “Locked,” he whispered.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Stay here.”

  He slipped out of the stall and out the bathroom door, leaving me to hover uncertainly in the men’s restroom by myself. I alternated between holding my breath and filtering air through my gloved fingers and wondered what normal people like Angie were doing right then. Eating breakfast and getting ready for a grueling day at the call center, probably. I couldn’t decide if I was envious or not.

  Reed returned a few minutes later with a small keyring. “Found the office,” he whispered. “Hopefully one of these works.”

  The fifth key he tried clicked into the lock, and the handle twisted in Reed’s hand. He pushed the door open, revealing a long hallway lined with closed doors. To our right stood a wooden podium that reminded me of a waiting area at a family restaurant. It even had little menus sticking out of the basket on its side. I pulled one out and skimmed it over.

  “‘Full body massage,’” I read aloud, keeping my voice low. “‘Hot mud treatment.’ They’re all just spa services. There’s even a section for facials.” I handed him the menu. “Holy cow, check out these prices. Five hundred for a massage.”

  “Clever,” whispered Reed. “I bet every service on this card is a code for something else. Come on. We need to check these rooms.”

  Now I knew why the Belladonna employee never emerged; he was probably treating himself to a little after-work rub down. Gross.

  Repeating his process from the door in the bathroom, Reed listened at the first room on our right before slowly twisting the knob and pushing open the door. The room was empty except for a long massage table and a small cluster of oil bottles on the floor. It smelled strongly of vanilla and sweat.

  Door after door, we found empty massage rooms with no signs of life. I got the feeling they’d been recently used though; the scents of the oils seemed too strong to be anything but fresh.

  By the time we searched the last room, which was just as empty as the first, my patience had run out.

  “Dammit!” I kicked
over a few plastic oil bottles and stormed back into the hall. “I thought she’d be here!”

  Reed crossed his arms and stared down the row of open doors. “Me too. I thought this would connect to the warehouse.”

  “Aren’t we in the warehouse now? There’s got to be a door somewhere.” I brought up my right fist and allowed it to harden into steel beneath my knit glove. “I’ll check.”

  He grabbed my wrist and yanked me back away from the wall, then held a finger up to his lips. “Jesus, Tess!” he whispered, lowering his hand. “You don’t think a noise like that will attract attention? Keep it together.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Reed released me, and I walked halfway down the hall, back toward the bathroom. He followed, and I let him pass me by. Then I turned on my heel and bolted back toward the blank, dead-end wall, letting the cold steel spread from my hands all the way up to my shoulder joint.

  “Stop!” Reed shouted behind me.

  He was faster than me, and I knew it. But I was only inches from my goal, and not even someone with superhuman speed could have stopped me in that moment. I crashed right through the sheetrock and wall studs. Dust swirled around me, and I skidded to a stop at the edge of a cavernous warehouse.

  Morning sunlight shone through high, narrow windows along the roofline two stories above me, illuminating several rows of filthy mattresses on the concrete floor. There wasn’t anyone there—no guards, no women, nobody. The space was littered with clothing, empty soda cans, and discarded candy wrappers. I let my arm return to normal and searched the room, kicking garbage out of the way as I ran from mattress to mattress, sweeping aside thin blankets and scanning for any sign of Bethany.

  Then I found them—a half-dozen long, shimmering strands of blonde hair resting on a stained pillow. I bent down and scooped them up, and then rough hands grabbed me from behind and dragged me backward.

  “Get off me!” Whoever had me was strong and had caught me completely off-guard. Struggling felt useless, but I did it anyway.

  He spun me around to face him, and I found myself mask-to-mask with Reed. His mouth was set into a hard line, and his brown eyes burned with furious anger. Without saying a word, he dragged me back through the warehouse, down the vanilla-soaked massage parlor hallway, and shoved me up and through the window in Bilgewater’s bathroom. I turned around, expecting him to climb up after me, but instead he crossed his arms and stared up at me through the window for several seconds.