The nerve of those lazy, self-righteous—
"Hey, did you hear?" Sylvia Daystrom squealed as she bombed through the propped open door into the spa.
Jane stopped in mid-crumple, her hands shaking.
"Yeah, I guess you did." Shaking her head, Sylvia made her way across the large main room to the nook where she had her manicure and pedicure station set up, open for business four days a week. "Can you believe the nerve of those morons?"
"Yeah, unfortunately. Nothing about this town surprises me anymore." Jane managed a smile. Sylvia was more a friendly acquaintance than an actual friend, but she could at least count on her to be one of the more common sense people in Fendersburg. Knowing Sylvia was disgusted by the contents of the story on the bottom half of the page helped release some of the pressure that threatened to take off the top of her head.
The town was abuzz with the front page stories. Jane's spa sat in the middle of the tiny business district. She kept her door open all day in the summer and the biggest gossips in town always sat on the benches in front of her store, so she heard everything. All day. Speculations and reminiscences and laughter and criticism. Every time she thought she felt better because someone agreed with her assessment of the irresponsible, immature twits in Fendersburg, someone came along who tried to dump everything back into the Ghost's lap. Jane watched the clock as the hour hand inched around, until she could finally close her shop.
She mentioned to half a dozen people, including one of the gossips out front, that she was tired, had a headache, and was going to take a sleeping pill and take her phone off the hook. That would ensure everyone in town knew by nightfall that no matter how many times they called or knocked, no one was going to get through to her. They would just have to wait to get their detox cream or a new blush or lipstick tomorrow.
She went to her apartment, washed up, and got something quick to eat, because she needed the energy even if she wasn't hungry. While she was still eating, she changed into her most comfortable clothes, tucked the newspaper into her backpack, then phased into Ghost mode and went up through the roof. She took her last bite of sandwich while hovering in the air above her shop, looking down at Fendersburg and wishing it could be as quiet and friendly as Neighborlee had been just last night. At eighty feet higher than the tallest building in town, she headed west and north for the Sanctum. This was something she definitely had to take to the Old Poops.
Thank goodness for secret identities. None of those idiots can follow through on their threat to sue the Ghost, because they can't find me. Jane snorted and grinned into the setting sun. Not to mention they think I'm a guy.
"I have never been so happy to be the Ghost in my entire life," she grumbled as she tossed the newspaper down in front of Reginald and Demetrius less than two hours later.
Reginald smoothed it out on the desk the size of a small swimming pool while Demetrius settled down in his easy chair in front of the massive fireplace big enough to roast an entire cow. One drawback to their Gifted longevity was that even in the muggy warmth of summer, they always felt cold. Jane used just enough Ghost field to let her get close to the roaring fire without dripping in sweat.
The headline read "Fendersburg Uses Samaritan Law to Sue Ghost." Jane snorted as she glanced over the big, black letters in slightly runny ink. The Fendersburg newspaper had used up the entire top half of the page listing all the things that had happened during the day she was away, which the Ghost hadn't fixed. It was a big news week in Fendersburg when the paper went to more than ten pages. The complaints lodged against the Ghost, her alternate persona, were printed in fourteen-point font instead of the standard ten, and took up the bottom half of the front page and most of the second page. Mrs. Crookins must have been furious when her "society" column got pushed to page three.
"I'm sorry, my dear. Obviously these..." Reginald scowled, searching for a better word.
"Throwbacks? Inbred morons? Hicks?" Jane suggested.
The proper old gentleman glared at her, but a few seconds later the look dissolved into merriment. He sighed and shook his head. "Obviously, these benighted folks have chosen to ignore your regular warning, posted in this very newspaper, warning them that you were not responsible for the everyday incidents and accidents in their lives—and more important, that you were one person and therefore could not be everywhere at once. No lawyer in the land will agree to take the lawsuit."
"I wouldn't count on that," Demetrius grumbled around the stem of his pipe. It was empty, and had been empty for as long as Jane had known her teachers. "For every ten good lawyers with common sense out there, there's one who makes ambulance chasers look reasonable and dignified. Someone will take up the case, just to make a name for himself."
"You have no legal responsibility. They can't force it on you," Reginald insisted, patting Jane's shoulder. "You regularly give them fair warning that you are not responsible for the minutia of their lives. The Ghost was sent to their town and the surrounding environs to handle large accidents and emergencies. Floods and tornadoes, water main breaks, fires, that sort of things. Not to retrieve improperly disciplined boys from trees twenty times in a day and find lost pets and protect idiots from their own stupidity." He folded the newspaper in half and slapped it on the desk in front of him for emphasis, nearly knocking his evening tea and scones off with the force of the blow.
Reginald might have been white-haired and retired from the superhero business, but he still had a lot of oomph left in him.
"However..."
Jane sagged, knowing she was in trouble when Reginald used "however." She had overlooked something, and he had seen it. The fine print, so to speak, in her unwritten superhero contract with the town of Fendersburg.
"Well, part of this problem, you brought on yourself," he said, softening his voice.
"Kick the girl while she's down, why don't you?" Demetrius grumbled.
"If she wouldn't wear herself to a frazzle pulling their nuts out of the fire, day in and day out, if she'd just let them fall down and bloody their noses a few times, they might learn to stand on their own two feet and not sit around on their fat arses, expecting her to come to their rescue." Reginald gestured with his scone. "You have to admit I'm right, Janie-gal."
"Yeah, you're right." She sank into the chair that had slid over into position behind her while they were talking. Furniture was constantly moving over to be right where it was needed at the Sanctum. After decades of Gifted powers being used in the massive old fortress, most of the students were willing to believe the furniture was semi-sentient and moved under its own power. "But honestly, it's easier to run and take care of the mess right away, instead of listening to them scream and whine and make the mess even worse."
"You're stuck, cookie," Demetrius growled, twisting around in his overstuffed chair to turn it without actually getting out of it. "Can't win no matter what you do or don't do. People like that should be allowed to wipe themselves out of the gene pool. That break-in and vandalism at the sewage treatment plant last year could have resulted in a nice, tidy explosion and wiped the whole moronic town off the map."
"Demetrius!" Reginald scolded.
"We were both wrong," his fellow-teacher snapped, and slid out of the chair to limp across the massive library. "Should have let Janie make a clean break three, four years ago when we realized what a mess the place was," he continued, and dropped into the chair next to Reginald's. "I dare you to convince me that something worthwhile could be found in that toxic dump. A very old joke insists that Earth is an insane asylum for the rest of the universe. Well, why not a place to dump the genetic aberrations that refuse to die out?"
Jane shivered. This talk didn't come very often from her teachers, but it regularly cropped up in the dormitories among all her fellow students, all of whom had been older than her. Where had they come from, how did they gain their powers, why weren't they with their parents or creators, and how had they ended up abandoned in remote spots outside small towns? And why only t
hree specific spots scattered around the United States? Surely there had to be other spots around the entire planet where children appeared who developed weird talents. That meant that somewhere in other countries, the equivalents of Reginald and Demetrius also searched for common denominators, trying to predict when more children like them would show up, and whisking them away to be trained and given purpose in life. That little girl in Australia had been an anomaly, in that no one had found her and snatched her up to safety yet. Demetrius had settled her with some Gifted friends in New Zealand, so she wouldn't suffer even more culture shock, rather than bring her back to the Sanctum to be the only student. If they were lucky, eventually other Gifted folk in that part of the planet would find her, and through her make contact.
Jane sighed, wondering if she dared to hope such luck would ever happen in her lifetime.
A bottle of whiskey levitated over from behind the stack of books that didn't hide it very well. Jane waited, holding her breath while the bottle tipped and poured three fingers' worth into the glass-bottomed tankard Demetrius always used, no matter what he was drinking, hot or cold, common beverages or scientific experiments. She was grateful his telekinetic talents were at full-power right now. Depending on the phases of the moon and whatever problems with other students he had been dealing with, his energy levels could be high enough to be dangerous to everyone around him, or so low that he couldn't even get out of his own chair without help. Another price of getting old, along with the lost ability to heal from anything short of amputation.
"You're right," Reginald said on a sigh. He quirked an eyebrow at them both when Jane gulped and Demetrius stopped in the middle of lifting his cup to his mouth. "Tell me, something, Janie-gal. How did you manage to ignore all the calls for help for so long that they decided to sue you for failure to respond?"
That was the something, the niggling sense of impending doom that she hadn't been able to pinpoint. Jane sighed and slouched down in her chair and braced herself. Not for a lecture, but for the disappointed looks from her teachers.
"I went away for a few days. Well, technically not even two whole days. Long enough for the town to burn itself down if anybody had been really ambitious."
"Should have done some good. Not long enough to teach them a lesson, obviously," Demetrius remarked, his gaze focused on the contents of the tankard.
"A vacation sounds lovely. Can't say you haven't earned one. But why only two days? Where did you go? I don't know whether to be proud or frustrated, that your conscience prompted you to get back to work," Reginald added, reaching over to pat her hand.
Deep breath.
"Neighborlee."
Demetrius didn't choke, as she half-feared, and he didn't drop the tankard. He put it down very slowly, his hands not quite shaking, but Jane sensed the tension trying to force its way out in the trembling that plagued his hands and voice the last few years.
"Did you..." He swallowed hard and finally tipped his head back to look her in the eye. "Did you perhaps...feel a call? Some sense of another child showing Gifts?"
"I'm not quite sure anymore. Just curiosity, I guess. And something seemed to—I don't know—I wasn't scared of the place anymore. I wondered..." She sighed and leaned back in the chair and rubbed her eyes, suddenly more weary than the gossip and threatened lawsuit could possibly make her. "How come, other than that town near Three Mile Island, none of the other possible emergence points you've posted us at have ever come up with kids like us? Other than Neighborlee? Why have you decided to look for more kids somewhere besides Neighborlee?"
"Well, other than the fact that you were the last one we found there?" Reginald squeezed her hand. "Face it, cookie, you're the youngest student in our superheroes academy. Maybe the powers-that-be decided we're just too old for the job, and they stopped sending students through for us."
"Or maybe we're just too dang nearsighted and getting tone-deaf, when it comes to a Gift activating," Demetrius growled.
"Sorry, but I have to vote for that theory," Jane said softly. "I saw something. Three somethings, actually, last night. That's part of the reason why I cut my trip short."
That got their attention, and she thought maybe some of the heavy, slightly sour aroma of self-pity in the mental atmosphere evaporated. Maybe, just maybe, she had done some good with her not-quite-forbidden visit to Neighborlee.
Demetrius had taught all of his students how to tell a story, and she got a kick out of tormenting the Old Poops by relating her short excursion in chronological order of events. Reginald muttered under his breath a few times. She couldn't quite make out most of his words, but at least once she distinctly heard him say, "Get on with it, already."
A spark of interest and new energy came back to their eyes for the first time in what felt like years, when she described flying over Neighborlee and seeing the trio park and get out of the truck, link arms, and rise up in the air. And the tingle of energy, the visible-but-not-visible shimmer, that were clear signs of a Gift in use.
"Adults, you say? That means they developed or were already using their Gifts around the time you did." Reginald thumped his fist on the table. "We missed them. How could we have missed them? Granted, your Gift caught our attention, but blinding us to the emergence of others?"
"We're set in our ways, Reggie." Demetrius actually smiled as he interlaced his fingers over his belly and slouched in his chair. "Haven't we been using the comic books to teach our students how real superheroes should act, how to hide their talents, how to live double lives? Who's to say that these three didn't discover comic books before they found out what they could do, and were clever enough to apply those principles when their Gifts emerged?"
"You don't think that book thief you tussled with, sixty-some years ago..." Reginald shook his head. Jane caught the tail end of a glare Demetrius shot him.
"What book thief?" She followed gut instinct. "You ran into someone in Neighborlee who might have had a Gift, and you got in trouble, so you left him there?"
"Too old," he muttered, frowning at a spot on the table. A sure sign he was getting lost in memories or thinking up some new theory that needed unfolding before it made sense.
"Too old?" She turned to Demetrius.
"Too hard nowadays to swoop in with falsified paperwork and whisk young ones like you away anymore," Demetrius said. His relaxed posture looked rock hard now.
"No, not you. The one you left behind. The one you got in trouble with. A book thief—someone who loves to read? Someone who might be imaginative enough to read comic books and play with the idea that Gifts are real, and not just fantasy? Someone who figured out what you were doing and got in your way?"
"Neighborlee, my dear child, is unique in one specific aspect: an unusually high ratio of lost, unclaimed children found within the town's boundaries. And, if you think about it, an inexplicable tendency for all of them to end up in the orphanage there, instead of being snatched up by other child welfare agencies throughout the county or even the state. Yet, out of every ten or so children who have absolutely no one, who grow up in Neighborlee and are never claimed, nine display not a smidgen of anything unusual."
"Who says?" She grinned when both old men cocked an eyebrow at her in almost perfect synchronization. "Let's say we are from another world or another universe or something. All the lost and unclaimed kids. We're all aliens. But only a tiny fraction of us actually have visible, noticeable, unusual Gifts. That leaves the rest with the genetics for something amazing. How many of us grow up and stay in Neighborlee, and marry other kids with alien genes?"
"We missed the Gifted ones because they weren't orphans," Reginald said with a groan. "We couldn't get to them, anyway, because they have families." He smacked himself in the middle of his forehead with his open palm and slouched down. "Families who had enough warning, enough intelligence, to teach them to hide what they could do."
"What about this book thief?"
"What about him?" Demetrius said with a grunt.
"How did he catch on to what you were doing?"
"It was more like he was more aware than the others," he said, the words coming slowly as if he didn't want to let them out. "And we noticed that energy levels fluctuated around him. Lights would brighten, small power surges, nothing that would damage any equipment, whenever he walked into a building. We watched him, tried to find out more information about him. And yes, we learned he was another lost child. He had already graduated from the orphanage and had set himself up in business. Hmm, can't remember exactly."
"Buying and selling," Reginald said. "Rattletrap truck, went around to estate sales, bought junk and fixed it, or refinished furniture. Had an amazing talent for finding treasures hidden under layers and years of filth and abuse. Was already developing a reputation so some rivals would follow him around and bid on anything he showed interest in." He chuckled. "Before we gave up watching him, we noticed he played tricks on some of those rivals, showing great interest in genuine trash, tricking them into bidding wars to get hold of it, then bowing out of the auction, leaving them paying big bucks for something they couldn't get rid of to save their lives. Made himself some enemies. He had a fondness for books. Made him stand out from the other collectors and dealers."
"Not a fondness. Passion. Obsession. He rarely resold any of those books." A half-grunt, half-chuckle escaped Demetrius. "He loved libraries, but he hated giving the books back. As I recall, there was a feisty young librarian who took him down like a fullback on a particularly fumble-fingered quarterback."
"The point is," Reginald said, and rolled his eyes in barely disguised amusement, "he noticed us watching him and he got in our faces, as you young folk put it. Any time we went back to Neighborlee, we had to look for him first, make sure he didn't notice us before we could check on the latest crop at the orphanage."
Hero Blues Page 3