Hero Blues

by Michelle L. Levigne

  Jane opened her eyes and stared down into the swirling, creamy depths of her mug. What was it about the Voice's words that bothered her, even while they made her feel like a cat getting its back stroked? She wanted to stretch luxuriously and purr, soaking in the sensation of approval and admiration that she certainly had never received in Fendersburg. And yet...

  "Anybody home?" Kurt's voice broke through her tangled thoughts, and she realized he had been knocking for a minute or two. Maybe more, for all she knew.

  Gotta go. Sorry. Problems to deal with. Jane nearly stumbled as she stepped away from the counter. She reached back for the mug and guzzled it as she went to the door.

  Again, she used her hands and feet, when she should have just flicked out a strand of her Ghost field to open the door for Kurt. Was she that depleted that she did physical things without thinking? And didn't do things with her Ghost power automatically, the way she was used to?

  Maybe she was coming down with something that sapped all her strength. It had to be something powerful, to overcome her immunities, after all.

  "Hey, you okay?" Kurt blurted, the moment she flung the door open. He reached out a hand to grab hold of her arm, and then Jane realized she was listing to the left far enough to threaten her balance.

  "Yeah. Fine. Just tired."

  "Something was going on in here, just a minute ago. I could feel you using your talent, but the tones were going sour and sounded muffled." He guided her over to the closest futon and settled her with a gentleness that brought tears to her eyes.

  How long had it been since someone treated her like she was made of glass?

  Then his words cut through the haze, like heavy cotton candy, trying to spin around her thoughts.

  "You finally felt it?"

  "Felt what? I knew you were doing something." He stroked a few sweaty hairs out of her eyes. "Whatever you were doing, it's taking a big bite out of you."

  Jane shook her head, trying to clear her mind just a little more. She moaned as a throbbing began, moving from her temples inward, and from the base of her skull up, until the three points banged into each other and tumbled down into her stomach. It was a good thing her stomach had felt like an empty cavern for the last hour, or she might be emptying it onto his shoes right about now.

  Come to think of it, maybe it was just low blood sugar giving her the woozies. Where had she left her coffee? Oh, yeah. It was in her hand. Funny, she had emptied it, but her insides still felt empty. The caffeine and sugar sure weren't doing her any good.

  "Jane? Hey, Earth to Jane." He snapped his fingers in front of her nose. "Where did you go?"

  She resisted an urge to bite his fingers.

  "It's nearly ten, I'm wiped out and starving. You didn't hear anything when you came up?"

  "Nothing but the chords going sour. You have a pretty, light kind of tune when you use your talent, but something is setting it off-kilter." He held onto her hand. Jane decided she liked that. "Maybe I should get you back to your school and have one of your teachers or doctors or whoever knows what's up take a look at you."

  "Thanks, but I've had enough of Dr. Frankenstein's theories and exams for two lifetimes."

  "Something is wrong. You were wiped out when I came in before, weren't you? And eating for three..."

  Jane felt another surge of nausea race through her, accompanied by panic. She tugged to free her hand, feeling trapped.

  An image from her nightmares shot through her mind, reverberating through her senses so that for a moment, she was truly there. In the deep, blacker-than-black, echoing cavern. Colder than cold. Beyond temperature, chilling the mind and soul. Darkness that sucked at her mind and heart and congealed the breath in her lungs.

  "Snap out of it," he growled, and shook her hard, both hands gripping her shoulders tightly enough, she thought she might have bruises in the morning. "What's going on? You were fading away on me. What were you doing that I should have sensed when I came up here, but didn't?"

  She stared into his eyes, caught between lunging at him with her fingers curved into claws, or collapsing in his arms in a weeping fit. What was going on? What was wrong with her?

  "We're on the same side, remember? We're the good guys. We're here to help people, and that includes each other." He tried to smile. "Tell your old buddy Kurt what's been eating at you, and maybe we can do something about it, okay?" The fear darkening his eyes convinced her.

  "Help people," she whispered. "Yes, we have to help him." She nodded, swallowed hard, and grimaced at the foul taste in her mouth. "If I don't eat something, first, I'm going to be flat on the floor."

  "Kind of hard to talk to that way." Kurt nodded and glanced around the room. "Okay, you sit tight and let me figure out what's what." He didn't wait for her response, but strode into the kitchen and got to work rummaging.

  Kurt Hanson was more of a Handyman than he ever could have guessed. Jane sighed in delight when he came back after a minimum of rummaging and slamming of doors. The tray he carried proved she had found a sympathetic soul.

  Nuts. Chocolate-dipped biscotti. Ice cream. Fudge sauce. Peanut butter sauce. Two frosty bottles of ginseng green tea. Chicken salad sandwiches piled high with pickles, lettuce, tomato and cheese slices. Her stomach growled loudly enough to echo when he set the tray down on the steamer trunk coffee table. She laughed, no time for embarrassment, when he handed her the ice cream first, instead of the sandwich.

  "My kind of guy," she mumbled through her first mouthful.

  Then the ice cream hit her taste buds, and a moment later her stomach, and she had no time or energy to concentrate on anything else. She inhaled her food, and felt only a little sheepish when she raised her head, looking for more, and found him just starting on his sandwich. He had eaten the ice cream first, also.

  He swallowed, wiped mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth, and tore his sandwich in half, offering her the untouched portion. "You need it more than me," he said, when Jane stared. He grinned when she nearly snatched the sandwich from his fingers and devoured it.

  "Okay," he said, when there was nothing left to eat but the last two biscotti and a few mouthfuls of tea left in the bottles. "What happened?"

  Feeling energized, without that gaping hole in her middle that drained her thoughts and good humor, Jane nodded. She owed him that much. Hadn't he been right when he pointed out that they were indeed on the same side? They were here to help people, and the Voice—whoever or whatever he was—needed help. She took a few seconds to gather her thoughts, then gave him a step-by-step recounting of every encounter with the Voice. Jane wasn't able to repeat most of their conversations, and that worried her. Usually her memory was so good with details. She could only give him her impressions of what she had discussed with the Voice.

  "We're from another dimension," Kurt said slowly. He nodded and tipped back the bottle for his last mouthful of tea. "Makes sense. And this guy is trapped in some other dimension and needs our help to get home. That's the gist of it?"

  "Basically."

  "I'm a little worried. Whoever this guy is, he's not like us. Or different enough that you can feel his presence and talk with him, but nobody else can hear him—and I can't feel his talent at work. Whatever it is." He captured Jane in an intense frown. She couldn't move for several seconds while he stared into her eyes. Maybe that was another talent he had, and no one realized it? Mesmerizing his prey.

  No, she wasn't his prey. He was her friend. He would help the Voice break free of his prison. Wouldn't he?

  "Did you notice that you're wiped out every time you talk with this guy?"

  Jane opened her mouth to say no, but stopped with the words caught at the back of her tongue.

  "We fought something nasty just after New Year's. It attacked during the New Year's Eve party, draining people, sending them down time loops, doing things to our brains. I had a hard time sensing it when it was working, and I'm thinking that's why I couldn't really sense what was going on with you."

&n
bsp; "But if the Voice is one of us, shouldn't you be able to?" she protested.

  "Yeah, I should. What I'm snagging my brain on is that this thing is draining you. Trying to suck energy out of you. Just like the oil slick monster."

  She snorted, muffling a giggle. One side of his mouth quirked up.

  "Yeah, really good name for it, huh? Well, that's what it looked like when it became visible. We were wrong to think we had put it back to sleep. We just made it change its tactics. It's trying for subtlety now, and making contact." His eyes narrowed and he stared at a point in the air just above her coffee table while he slowly shook his head.

  "Why you?"

  Chapter Fifteen

  "Maybe because I'm new. I haven't encountered it before. It isn't familiar, but I don't automatically assume it's evil. If it's an enemy. The Old Poops brought us up with the maxim that 'different is dangerous,' but at the same time to keep in mind that even though we're different, we must never be dangerous. So while other people shoot first, we're the ones who need to raise our shields, and ask a lot of questions before we even warm up the photon torpedoes, you know? We're always supposed to try to blend into the crowd and observe, instead of assuming someone from another planet is out to steal all our air and water."

  "So even though this thing stays in the darkness and doesn't show its face and drains you whenever the two of you talk and wants you to keep things quiet, you automatically assume it's friendly?" Kurt's eyebrow raised high enough in skepticism to threaten to shoot off his forehead.

  "Don't you go the other extreme, when something unusual shows up? Didn't you approach me as an enemy?"

  "That was a mistake. Normally, all three of us would have come to check you out, but we're still cleaning up from the last encounter with the invader or whatever it is. It keeps trying new tactics, so we're leery of anything unfamiliar. And yeah, we've been wondering about all the kids who vanished as soon as their talents started activating, so mixed with the three guys who attacked Lanie just before Christmas—"

  "Your first reaction is to think that all of us were whisked away to train us to take down the country, evil mutants with no X-Men to protect the poor, defenseless, backward, ordinary humans?" She could almost laugh.

  "It's a viable theory. Glad to know you're familiar with the classics."

  Jane had to snort at that one. Funny, how a bit of humor helped her shrug off a little of the ice that kept trying to coat her bones.

  "Here's the thing. Maybe because I'm new, it isn't afraid I'll attack it like you guys do whenever it shows up. How friendly would you be," she hurried on, when Kurt opened his mouth to contradict her, "if every time you tried to make contact, people attacked you and shoved you back through whatever doorway you're trying to get through?"

  "For one thing, we don't attack. We don't go looking for it. It finds us. Most of what we do is defensive."

  "Yeah, from your viewpoint."

  Kurt grinned, surprising her. "The best defense is a good offense."

  "I need to learn more about the last encounter with this thing. Consider that it isn't the oil slick or whatever the invader at New Year's was, but all that activity, all the psionic energy or whatever you want to call it, disturbances of the walls between universes, it woke up the..." Her face warmed and she felt totally ridiculous admitting the name she had given to her new, hopeful friend. "Say all that activity woke up the Voice." She hesitated half a second.

  No negative reaction from Kurt.

  "What if this is something or someone entirely new? You said you sensed me but not anything or anyone else, right? So it's not the same vibrations as the oil slick New Year's monster. Right?"

  "Right," he said, his voice a soft rasp. "But consider this. You're exhausted after talking with that thing—the Voice. Would a friend suck you dry?"

  "Not dry yet." She felt slightly nauseous, or maybe the correct sensation was dizzy, from the combination of guilt and irritation and a faint undercurrent of fear. Kurt was right to point out that snag, and she wondered why she didn't see it as a danger sign, and wondered further why she was more irritated that he had to point it out.

  "This thing isn't like us—"

  "Duh!"

  "Let me finish. It's not like us, to the point that I can't feel its power signature, whatever vibrations it gives off when it uses its talents. You can't mix us and them—it's not like all those shows on SyFy, where the brilliant human scientist cobbles together an interface between his laptop and the alien tech using nothing but spit and baling wire." A crooked grin cracked his face for a moment. "Granted, that's what I do, but that's me. Fact is stranger than fiction. The thing is, this isn't gizmos and machines. It's our kind of mutants or aliens or whatever, not mixing with what's out there."

  Jane grinned, pleased that such logic holes irritated him just like they irritated her. A wave of exhaustion surged through her, making her wonder if she was just so wiped out that her mind went off on tangents.

  "Okay, you've got a point. What do we do about it?"

  "You..." He looked around her apartment, and then hooked his thumb down the hall to her bedroom. "Get some rest. You need to build yourself up again, and if you can, don't listen when this Voice guy comes calling again. First, I need to do some research. Check some things. People I need to talk to. Then I'm going to talk to Lanie and Felicity, compare notes, and we'll finally have that meeting we should have had the day you got here."

  Jane shivered, feeling as if he wasn't really there in the room anymore—not mentally or emotionally. He was already out somewhere, lining up the people he needed to talk with, the things he needed to check out. His body was there, but the parts of him that mattered were already gone, working. She shuddered, feeling a little nauseous again, when she wondered if he was worried about her at all, or all his concern was focused only on Neighborlee.

  "It might be a while," Kurt said. He took a step toward her, and Jane imagined, just for a moment, he would hug her.

  That was ridiculous. They had barely shifted from antagonists to allies. She was just tired. Exhausted to the point of hallucinating. And she was starving again.

  * * * *

  The next day brought an irritating mix of ice and slush and fierce winds, to the point Jane could convince herself the weather was a sentient being having a hissy fit. Business was slow, and that suited her just fine. She didn't have to deal with many customers, or many questions that taxed her brain. She made a big pot of her favorite restorative herbal tea and sipped it all day. In between snacks. Slow traffic and few customers, probably kept home by the lousy weather, made it easier for her to munch her way through the day. This further evidence of how the drain on her energies had affected her body made her more inclined to really think about what Kurt said and accept his theories.

  That still irritated her. At the same time, she found some humor in the whole situation. Maybe that was a sign she was recovering.

  Jane amused and distracted herself, playing with the wording for the report she would eventually have to write up for Demetrius and Reginald and the Council. After rush hour dwindled down to nothing on the street outside, she played with the idea of closing up early. The people in Neighborlee had a lot of common sense, and that included staying home on a night like this. She was grateful she only had to go upstairs.

  That settled it. She was closing up early and spending the evening goofing off. Maybe she would be fully recovered by the time Kurt showed up with some information, some decisions, some more solid theories.

  Her hand shook as she reached for the sign in the window, to turn CLOSED to face the street. What if, now that she was totally alone, with no people popping in on the spur of the moment, the Voice decided to visit again? What if it drained her even worse than before? What if the draining was entirely unintentional, unconscious on its part, a result of being in such entirely different universes or dimensions or realities?

  Don't borrow trouble. Jane clenched her fist to stop the trembling, then opened her h
and and resumed reaching for the sign.

  In the few seconds she was distracted, a Jeep had pulled up into the parking spot directly in front of her door. She looked through the sleety snow blowing at about a thirty-degree angle and saw a woman in a long hooded cloak get out of the passenger side. She stepped into the light coming from high above the door, and Angela smiled at Jane from the depths of the hood. Jane hurried to the door, shuddering for two steps in her eagerness to talk with Angela. She mentally punched herself. Why hadn't she gone to Angela before? If Kurt was busy trying to track down answers, wouldn't he have gone to Angela for counseling? Maybe Angela was here with information from Kurt?

  Then Jane saw a young woman with long amber hair scramble out of the back seat and yank up the hatch of the Jeep. The driver got out and it looked like she held onto the door while her passenger hauled something out of the back of the Jeep. Three seconds later, Jane understood. The wheelchair meant Lanie Zephyr. Logic said the woman with the amber hair was the third of the trio, Felicity.

  "And here I thought this storm would drive away all my customers," Jane greeted them as Lanie settled into her wheelchair, "and I could curl up for the evening early, with a movie and a big bowl of popcorn." She held the door open, gesturing for them to come in.

  Her fingers tingled, just for a second, as Lanie's wheelchair popped a wheelie and came up the curb onto the sidewalk without Lanie visibly pushing it. Well, at least she could still feel other Gifts at work. During a few low spots among all her musing and gnawing on the problem throughout the day, she had worried that what Demetrius and Reginald had feared had happened to her. That she had somehow been burned out by her contact with the Voice, whether the draining of her energies was intentional or not. Jane exchanged a grin with Lanie and watched as her wheelchair bumped over the threshold and down the shallow step into the spa.

  "Sorry. Purely social call," Felicity said, after all three of them were inside the shop. She shut the door. "Just slide the latch?"