Love for the Cold-Blooded. Or

by Alex Gabriel

  Star Knight’s mouth was moving, but the silence in the lair was absolute. It was hilarious to watch him blink and frown, obviously flabbergasted by this unprecedented phenomenon. Pat struggled with an unsuitable urge to laugh as he arranged himself on his slightly oil-spattered cushion, quickly helping a fed-up Millie to the ground before arching his back in what he hoped was a languidly attractive fashion. Serpentissima had installed the aural shield to save everyone’s hearing (and of course the recording equipment) from the ruckus Star Knight’s entry had been bound to cause, and it looked like Cea was having a little fun with it, just because she could.

  Abruptly, the sound of Star Knight clearing his throat rent the silence. His brow had creased very slightly in puzzlement, but smoothed out immediately as soon as he once again heard the sound of his own voice. “Aha!”

  He grinned triumphantly before once more assuming a suitably wrathful expression, pointing an accusing finger at Serpentissima. “So it is you, vile villain! Serpentissima has crawled out of her foul den to once again poison the earth with her stench. I should have known.” The hoagie’s voice rang out with sonorous gravity, melodrama and indignation wafting around him like a particularly ridiculous cloak.

  Pat made a stifled sound, but was pretty sure nobody heard him. If the hoagie went on like this, though, Pat was doomed. How was he supposed to keep a straight face? Maybe if he thought of sad, unfunny things as hard as he could… A quick glance at the other Sluts reassured him that they, at least, were doing a great job at keeping their cool and doing their slutty thing. Most of them even managed the requisite blank-faced obliviousness of their surroundings that Zen had insisted was the best tack for a Slut to take.

  “Yes, Child of Argon. It is I, Serpentissima… the Serpent Rising.”

  The Dread Serpent’s voice slithered and hissed and wound into all the dark spaces of his mind. It was the cold between the stars, a hopeless void devoid of all life; it was nameless terror, whispering of the darkest fears of all who had ever lived. The hair stood up on the back of Pat’s neck, laughter draining from him so completely it might never have existed at all.

  Damn, his mom was awesome.

  Serpentissima spoke on, but Pat was so caught up in the terrifying harmonics of her voice that he missed the actual meaning of her words. He did not miss Star Knight’s underwhelmed reaction, though. The dude seemed entirely unfazed, even a little impatient, idly tapping the toe of one boot against the crumbling stone floor. His genuine lack of fear in the face of a supernatural threat — a threat that could actually hurt him, when most things on this planet could not — would probably have impressed Pat, if he hadn’t been utterly sure it was rooted in stupidity rather than courage.

  “Your reign of terror ends now,” the hero declared finally. His form seemed to shift oddly, and Pat blinked several times before he realized Star Knight was lifting off, feet leaving the ground to hover a hand’s breadth above the red tape cross. An aura of power began to gather around him… not a glow so much as a thrumming in the air. “Never again shall your rank shadow fall upon — you!”

  The harsh gasp of genuine shock shattered Star Knight’s practiced ‘heroic savior’ facade. Unfortunately, Pat was in no position to savor the hoagie’s gape-mouthed, astonished expression; he was too busy mirroring the look, gaping up at the electric blue forefinger the dude was stabbing at Pat’s face. Behind the accusing finger, the near-fluorescent blue eyes fixed on Pat were as wide and empty as the cloudless sky.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you without a mask?” Star Knight shouted. Rage sat strangely on his too-smooth, too-symmetrical features, distorting them into something even more disturbingly mask-like than usual.

  Pat blinked. He’d heard that phrase before, pretty much verbatim. Did hoagies all use the same hackneyed phrase book or something?

  Lameness had never yet stopped Star Knight, of course. If it had, he could never have embarked upon his career in the first place. “You’re Sir Toby’s minion. I saw your picture on the infoweb! You’re one of the heinous creatures who stole my cape and disfigured me!”

  Disfigured, seriously? But fine, if that was what this was about, then Pat knew what the appropriate reaction was — namely, rolling his eyes scornfully. “Way to be a total drama queen, dude. We drew on your face with a marker, which was totally on you for falling asleep in the midst of your enemies. What did you expect, that we’d throw you a tea party?”

  Pat never saw him move. One moment, Pat was reclining sluttily on his cushion, Star Knight assuming a hyper-dramatic pose of accusation before him; the next, Pat was dangling in mid-air, choking as Star Knight lifted him by his leather Serpent Slut collar.

  A sudden commotion erupted all around, but Pat couldn’t spare much attention just then. He was entirely occupied with desperately scrabbling at his neck, Star Knight’s hand, anything he could reach. His only clear thought was that he was glad Millie had decided to find a quieter spot. Had she still been wound around his neck, Star Knight would have crushed her like a bug, and never even noticed.

  “Unhand him at once, you fiend,” hissed Serpentissima. Out of the corner of his eye, Pat could see her massive bulk darting forward with serpent speed, energy crackling around her in a nimbus of power. He’d never heard his mother sound as vicious, he reflected dimly. He’d have been scared, if he were Star Knight.

  Pat wasn’t scared. He had neither the time nor the attention for it. Instead, his world had become very bright and very clear, narrowed down to a few razor-edged facts and factors.

  He tried to hook his fingers into the Slut collar to relieve the pressure on his neck, but there was no room — wrapped both hands around Star Knight’s steel-hard wrist instead, pulling himself up in the most desperate and fucked-up pull-up ever. It worked, thank all the gods. The relief of not having his entire body weight trying to strangle him was the sweetest thing Pat had ever felt. He gulped down a greedy lungful of easy air, two; waited out the sparks and dull grayness that had begun to creep in at the edges of his vision.

  By the time he had a sliver of attention to spare, Star Knight was moving in the air, turning. It made Pat’s grip on his gloved wrist slide, made him clutch it so hard he might have broken a human man’s bones.

  A wash of green-white energy passed through Pat and made him gasp, made the inside of his skull light up and every bone and tendon ache with a sudden, intense ague; made his mouth taste bitter like ash and salt. Star Knight froze where he hovered, his strained grimace showing blindingly white teeth. A pale green nimbus shimmered around him, and barely visible tendrils slithered over his form, hissing faintly. Only his right hand was free of the shimmer; the drifting tendrils stopped just short of where Pat clutched the hoagie’s wrist.

  The Serpent Scourge. Wow, that one took serious mojo. Mom wasn’t playing around.

  This was his chance. Star Knight was momentarily indisposed, so Pat took a deep breath and made himself loosen one hand from his grip on the hero’s wrist; kept his body weight off his neck with a single arm (sending a quick mental thank you to his coach and his inexplicable love of the one-armed pull-up) while he felt for the collar with his free hand.

  Two alien fingers were hooked into the D-ring at the front of Pat’s collar. Beneath the thin covering of the glove, the inhuman tendons and muscles were like stone. Pat would never be able to break Star Knight’s hold; nothing on this world was as strong as that damned hoagie. But he was only holding Pat by the Slut collar. If Pat could open the collar before the Serpent Scourge wore off —

  Right there. There, that was the collar’s buckle, immobile and uncooperative beneath Pat’s oil-slick, fumbling fingertips. Damn it, this wasn’t going to work — the collar was still pulled too taut by Pat’s weight. He couldn’t get the buckle open like this… wouldn’t have been able to even if his fingers hadn’t been half-numb, clumsy and oily.

  Which was the moment when the buckle — never designed for this kind of abuse — gave by itself.

&
nbsp; Pat let out a startled gasp as he fell backwards, the sharp tongue of the broken buckle scraping a line of fire along the side of his neck. In the half-instant before his grip on the hoagie’s wrist brought him up with a sharp jerk and a painful wrench of his shoulder, he caught confused glimpses of the floor (too far below), the hole in the ceiling (too close and at a weird angle), and his mother’s imposing serpentine shape raised to its full height, both arms spread wide with twin venom-green suns gleaming in her palms.

  Star Knight hovered above Pat looking greenish and grim, locked in a magic-induced paralysis he’d be bound to shake off in the next second or so. His arm was still outstretched, fingers hooked into Pat’s collar, now merely a thin length of dangling leather. Pat’s fingers were slipping inexorably from the hoagie’s gloved wrist, slick with oil and sweat.

  That was fine. It was fine — it would work, the floor wasn’t too far down for a controlled fall. Pat needed to get away from the hoagie anyway, now, before he fought free of the Serpent Scourge and grabbed hold of some less detachable part of Pat.

  Pat’s fingers were stiff and reluctant to obey, but he forced them open, allowing Star Knight’s rock-solid wrist to slide from his grip.

  Amber liquid spewed from unseen nozzles the instant Pat began to fall. Pat had tucked himself in and tried to roll as he hit the ground, but he was still too stunned by the impact to make much sense of the sight of Star Knight in the air above, enveloped in an amorphous golden-brown mass. And then Pat had all remaining breath knocked out of him as he was swept aside by the tip of an enormous serpent’s tail, just in time to clear the spot he’d landed on for a huge-ass load of crystallized Hero’s Bane, complete with freeze-dried hero center.

  “Ow,” Pat croaked, weakly. Strictly speaking, this called for considerably stronger language, but he had to watch his mouth; his mom was right there trying to hug and cuddle him, despite the fact he was crumpled on the floor with his left hand trapped underneath a frozen superhero. It didn’t help that even crouched down she was five meters tall, as well as still glowing with dread power and covered in green and bronze body glitter.

  “My poor, darling little snakelet! You really must learn to grow some fangs, one of these days. Zenobia, be a dear and get Star Knight into his alcove, will you?”

  Zen appeared with a small group of minions and righted the amber-frozen Star Knight… or tried to, rather. As soon as they’d rolled over the oblong crystal the Hero’s Bane had turned into, it became apparent they had a bit of a problem.

  Inside his aesthetically pleasing stasis prison, Star Knight looked startled and humongously dorky, mouth twisted crookedly in what looked to have been protest, one eye half-squinted shut, the other entirely open. Except for his facial expression, he’d actually been caught in a rather heroic pose, with his cape flung back dramatically over one shoulder and one arm outstretched as though he were stabilizing himself mid-flight. The black leather collar dangling from his fingers added an interesting element of ‘what the fuck’. It was rather artistic, not to mention absolutely hilarious.

  Considerably less hilarious was the fact that several of Pat’s fingers were trapped in the crystal along with Star Knight. They weren’t actually encased, but the backs of his ring, middle and index fingers were stuck to the crystal surface.

  “Oops,” said Pat, staring. It looked for all the world like Pat had been caught in half-solid amber when trying to rap his knuckles against Star Knight… right at the level of the hoagie’s crotch.

  He tugged a bit to free himself, but no luck. Even when he stemmed his pirate boots against Star Knight’s crystallized middle for leverage, his fingers remained stuck.

  “Patrick,” said Serpentissima, a distinct hissing in her tone. “This is hardly suitable.”

  No kidding. “It’s not like I did this on purpose, Mom!”

  Dad turned up then, wielding an industrial-sized bottle labeled ‘scentless massage and body oil’. He’d found the time to don a voluminous ivory shirt with dramatically billowing sleeves, which was a huge improvement, in Pat’s considered opinion. “You should get back on your throne, Tissa. The others will be here any —”

  “Phase Four achieved,” Hell’s measured voice boomed through the cavern, cutting Dad off mid-word. “I repeat, we are now entering Phase Four. Subjects are approaching the lair in two organized groups, all positively identified. Group one: Nexus, Ariadne and Mariachi, ETA throne room seventy seconds. Group two: Silver Paladin and Captain Cool, ETA labs sixty-five seconds. I am organizing lab defense as first priority and will then proceed to throne room. Over and out.”

  “Martin?” Mom was already half turned back towards the throne, raising herself to her full height once more.

  Dad nodded at her reassuringly. “I’ve got this, go! You too, Zen. I’ll take care of Patpat.”

  “Nice turn-out,” Zen was saying as she hurried to catch up with Serpentissima. “Almost all the big names… and Mariachi. Maybe we can keep that one unfrozen and send him scurrying back out to spread the tale of your conquest!”

  “An excellent idea, Zenobia,” Mom said approvingly. “But we must see how the tides of battle run. He can be rather annoyingly noisy, I hear.”

  A new counter flicked up on the left-hand wall of the cavern, counting down at alarming speed. They were really cutting it a bit fine this time. Though… maybe the sudden anxiety in Pat’s gut was less due to the time crunch, and more down to the fact that this was going down while he was attached to a frozen superhero. It changed things.

  Dad pressed his giant bottle of oil into Pat’s free hand and gathered up the minions with a wave and a nod. In no time at all, he’d organized them into an effective unit that carried Star Knight over to a likely spot by the side wall. Pat followed along like a kid, dragged by the hand. One minion brought an adjustable metal framework from the nearest hero-displaying alcove. Within seconds, Dad and the minions had set Star Knight’s crystalline shape up on the stand. “There’s no time to bring over a wall hanging as a backdrop,” Dad said briskly, “But arrange those potted trees to frame Star Knight, will you? Yes, like that. Looks good — he can stay there until we have a chance to move him to his alcove. And you, Patpat, come here.”

  Ha, ha. Pat stared at his father impassively to convey the fact that he was not funny. The effect was somewhat ruined when he yelped as Dad poured a generous glug of oil over his trapped hand, splashing it halfway down Star Knight’s crystal-encased leg, too.

  “There you go. Stay at it and you should be able to work free. And while I’m here, hold still.” Pat held still, and Dad poured a steady stream of oil all over Pat: up along his trapped left arm and over his chest by the collarbones, and then down his right arm. Pat was too startled to protest. When Dad turned him with a firm hand on his shoulder, Pat allowed it meekly, hardly even shivering as tepid rivulets of viscous liquid ran down his back. “Spread that out evenly, Patpat. I’m leaving you the bottle. Remember, son, never skimp on the body oil. If the coating you apply is too thin, it soaks right into the skin. It looks best when it’s thick and gleaming, and you don’t want to be forced to touch up when the cameras are rolling.”

  Pat hmmphed grumpily, but regretted it immediately at the crestfallen slump of his dad’s shoulders at his son’s lack of appreciation for his advice. “Thanks, Dad,” he said quickly, and smiled. “That’s really good to know. I’ll definitely keep it in mind.”

  Dad smiled at him fondly before hurrying off with the minions, so Pat considered the save a success. This was way too much body oil though, seriously. The stuff was dripping all over Pat’s pants and the floor, and ticklish little trickles were winding their way into his pants at several points, all of them distracting. Pat did his best to hastily distribute the oil over his upper body, where it was supposed to go, but with only one hand, it was trickier than you’d think. He couldn’t do much of anything about his right arm, and all in all couldn’t help but feel like he’d tripped into a giant’s salad bowl just before said giant
poured on the dressing.

  He wiped his oil-slick palm against Star Knight’s crystal prison, smearing the clear amber in front of his face with unsightly streaks. Served the dude right for being such an ass.

  There wasn’t much time left and the Sluts up by the throne weren’t getting it together on their own, so Pat abandoned decorum and simply yelled instructions at the top of his voice until his Slut Second, Tom, had taken Pat’s place at Serpentissima’s feet, and the others had shifted to make up for Tom’s absence on the left. “Good, now lounge!” Pat shouted, when he was satisfied. “You know the drill, be sexy and shit.”

  They lounged and were sexy and shit, and did a pretty good job of it, too. The tableau looked great from back here, which was some consolation for not being able to take part in it himself. Tom did have nice shoulders on him, as Pat couldn’t help but notice. His abs weren’t anything to sneeze at, either. Pat would have to ask him about his workout regimen.

  Right now, though, Pat had to see about freeing himself. The oil on his trapped fingers hadn’t immediately helped, but the idea was sound, and it wasn’t like Pat had a whole lot of other options. “You’re a total nuisance,” Pat informed the frozen Star Knight while he tried to work some of the lubricating oil in between his fingers and the stasis crystal. “What even is this. Of all superheroes whose crotch my hand should be stuck to, you are at the absolute cold hard rock bottom of the list. No joke.”

  Star Knight declined to answer. Becoming a crystallized knightsicle had done wonders for his personality, but he was still an arrogant prick.

  Pat heard the first faint notes of music then, muffled and distorted by distance and layers of bedrock. Within seconds, he could make out a jaunty, brassy tune with a driving rhythm, rousing and energetic. It grew louder with amazing speed.