Karma Girl

by Jennifer Estep

  Rose petals? Champagne? A ring hidden in a computer-shaped chocolate cake? Henry was more of a romantic than I’d given him credit for. In a completely geeky sort of way.

  “Well, that’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

  My voice didn’t come out too strangled. I, of course, thought Henry was making a terrible mistake, just like I’d thought Sam had been making a terrible mistake when he’d started boinking Carmen when the Terrible Triad was after us. But I forced myself to be polite. For once. For Henry’s sake.

  Lulu stared at me like I’d just said the dumbest thing in the world. Maybe I had. A superhero and a computer hacker? Not a good combo.

  “Look at me, Fiona. I’m in a wheelchair, in case it’s escaped your notice. It’s not all hearts and flowers, you know.”

  “So? Lots of people are in wheelchairs. It doesn’t seem to bother Henry any, so why should it bother you?”

  Lulu sighed and pushed a wisp of black-and-blue hair out of her face. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Is it because of sex?” In relationships, just about everything came back to sex in the end. Sex or money. Or both. “The two of you do have sex, don’t you?”

  “Of course we have sex,” she snapped. “Just because I’m in a wheelchair doesn’t mean I don’t have needs. That Henry doesn’t have needs. In fact, Henry and I have sex quite frequently—”

  I held my hand up. “Don’t tell me. I don’t need the mental image of you two supernerds going at it. It’s bad enough Carmen and Sam do the nasty in every corner of the manor imaginable. I don’t want to hear about anyone else or I’ll never be able to sit on the furniture again. So if sex isn’t the problem, what is?”

  Lulu stared at her still legs. “I’m not just paralyzed. I can’t have kids either,” she mumbled.

  “What?” I asked, straining to hear her. “What did you say?”

  “I can’t have kids. I can’t marry Henry because I can’t have kids. There. I’ve told you what’s wrong. Are you happy now?” Tears shimmered in Lulu’s dark eyes.

  “So what?”

  Her mouth gaped open. “So what?”

  I shrugged. “So what? So you can’t have kids. Lots of women and men can’t have kids. Besides, do the two of you even want kids right now? Aren’t you a little young for that? You’re not even thirty yet.”

  “No, we don’t want kids right now. But someday we would, and I can’t give them to Henry.” More tears puddled in her eyes, threatening to spill down her cheeks.

  “You could always adopt,” I pointed out. “There are lots of great kids out there who need a good home.”

  Lulu shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Lulu stared at me as if the answer should be obvious. I was getting rather tired of that look. I wasn’t a mind reader like my father was. I couldn’t discern someone’s innermost thoughts with a single, soul-searing gaze. Beat it out of them, yes. Fry them alive? Always. But glean pertinent information with a quick look? No, not so much.

  “Because of Henry’s power.”

  “What does Henry’s power have to do with you not being able—Ah.” The lightbulb switched on inside my head. “If you can’t have kids, then Henry couldn’t pass his mind-melding power on to the next generation of Lo-Harrises.”

  “Bingo. If we adopted a kid one day, we’d love her to death, but she wouldn’t have Henry’s power.”

  “But you don’t even know that Henry’s kid would get his power anyway. Or that it would manifest in the same way. Sometimes, these things skip a couple of generations.”

  My father and I were a prime example. It had been my mother and her fiery temper that had influenced my power, not my father’s calm sensibility. Johnny and James Bulluci were another pair that proved my point. Johnny had a power his father had probably never dreamed of. But that’s what happened when you battled ubervillains on a regular basis. The villains always seemed to live in the nastiest places, surrounded by acres of radioactive waste. The goo wasn’t good for your skin or hair—or for your genes. More than one hero had had her powers altered by being exposed to radioactive waste over the years. And if it didn’t get you, then it would more than likely get your kids and change them in some way—either good or bad.

  “I don’t think Henry would care about whether or not his kid had powers. He’d love him or her just the same.”

  Lulu shook her head. “I’ve run the numbers. There’s a good chance the kid would either have Henry’s power or some other manifestation of it. I don’t want to take that chance, that opportunity, away from Henry.”

  Run the numbers? Lulu was making decisions about her love life based on some statistics a computer program had spit out. How romantic.

  The other woman eyed me. “Haven’t you ever thought about having kids? About passing your powers on? Isn’t that what you would want?”

  I thought about it. I’d been a fire-starting hellion when I was a kid. Everyone on the street where we’d lived in Ireland had thought that I was an arsonist and hopped up on steroids. Only the fact that my father was a policeman had kept me out of juvenile detention. Even as a kid, I had a tendency to beat up bullies.

  Travis and I had talked about having children, about the fact that we might pass our powers on to them. Travis had been thrilled with the idea, but I was more ambivalent about it. Don’t get me wrong. I loved having superstrength and the ability to zap a pizza with my eyeballs. But powers weren’t the beat-all, end-all of the world, as Carmen was so fond of reminding me. Sure, superheroes got plenty of perks, but being one was a lot of hassle too. The long hours and late nights. The constant beatings and narrow escapes. The continual drain on my finances. Having to make nice with the likes of Kelly Caleb, Erica Songe, and other members of the press. My constant need to eat everything in sight. It got old sometimes.

  But the most important thing I’d learned over my years of being a superhero was this—having powers couldn’t keep you safe from all the big, bad things out there in the world. Travis’s death was proof of that.

  I answered Lulu. “It’d be nice to pass my power on, but it wouldn’t determine if I loved my kid or not. And it sure as hell wouldn’t keep me from being with the man I loved.”

  I opened my mouth to further argue my point, but Lulu snapped her hand up.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said through gritted teeth. “Talking won’t fix anything, especially not my shriveled-up ovaries and useless legs. Let’s get back to your problem.”

  She pounded away on her laptop, signaling the end of our conversation. For now.

  I started drumming my fingers on the table again while Lulu typed and clicked and muttered under her breath.

  “Oh, go hoover down a pizza or something,” Lulu snapped about five minutes later. “I can’t concentrate with you giving me the laser gaze. All those heat waves make my computer freak out.”

  “Fine,” I sniffed, threw my hair over my shoulder, and flounced out of the library.

  I stalked to the underground kitchen, but I didn’t hoover down a pizza as Lulu had so indelicately suggested. Instead, I ate three boxes of Oreos and drank two gallons of milk. I was just finishing up when Lulu’s voice bellowed out of the intercom.

  “I’ve got the information. You can come back to the library now.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, draining the last of my milk.

  By the time I returned to the library, Lulu had compiled several of inches of paper on Johnny Bulluci. A printer whirred and chugged in the background, spitting out more reams.

  “How did you get so much information so fast?” I asked.

  “Carmen showed me how she does it,” Lulu said. “She’s still working on Frost and Scorpion’s real identities, although they didn’t leave a trail for her to follow like Malefica did. Carmen doesn’t think any of them died at the ice cream factory, not even Malefica.”

  “I doubt any of them are dead myself,” I replied. “Unfortun
ately, ubervillains are very resilient. One or all the members of the Terrible Triad will come back to Bigtime someday, and we’ll be ready for them, real identities or not.”

  “Anyway, I set up a couple of computer programs to facilitate the process. I’m just printing the last of it now,” Lulu said, tidying up some pages. “This is all pretty normal stuff. School, college, business honors. Lots of friends, female and otherwise. Until three months ago.”

  “When his father died, and he took over as Johnny Angel.”

  “You betcha.” Lulu grabbed the last of the pages from the printer and shoved them into a thick blue binder. “After that, the life of Johnny Bulluci gets a bit more murky.”

  “Naturally.”

  Life was always murky in the world of superheroes and ubervillains. For someone like Johnny, who wasn’t on one side or the other, it would be positively gray. And I hated gray.

  Lulu tossed me the binder. “Knock yourself out.” She paused. “And try not to set those on fire, okay? I don’t want to have to print them out again.”

  “I won’t, Mom,” I muttered, settling myself at the round, wooden table.

  Lulu steered her chair toward the door.

  “Hey, Lulu?”

  She stopped. “What?”

  “Thanks. I really do appreciate it.”

  I’d said thank you twice now in less than twenty-four hours. I really was going to have to quit freaking out and getting people to do me favors.

  She nodded. “Back at you.”

  “What did I do?”

  Lulu stared at me. “You listened.”

  Then, she opened the door and zoomed away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I waited until the sound of Lulu’s wheelchair faded away. Then, I cracked open the binder and started reading.

  Lulu had compiled quite a bit of information on James John aka Johnny Bulluci. Age thirty-six. Hair blond. Eyes green. Blah, blah, blah. I knew the boring facts already. I wanted to get to the good stuff.

  I skimmed through pages detailing Johnny’s progress in high school and college, as well as the business accolades he’d received over the years. To my surprise, there were more than a few of those. I flipped through pages of earnings and stock reports. Since Bobby had retired and Johnny had taken over the majority of Bulluci Industries, the company had almost doubled its profits. Johnny was definitely more than just a sexy guy. He was a shrewd businessman who wasn’t afraid to take risks. Sam would have approved.

  Finally, I found what I was looking for—James Bulluci’s obituary. It had appeared in both The Chronicle and The Exposé. Lulu had even downloaded the transcripts off the SNN archive service for me.

  James Michael Bulluci, 58, died in a fiery car accident on Feb. 7. According to Bigtime police, an unknown driver apparently hit the rear of Bulluci’s silver Mercedes, causing the gas tank to explode. Bulluci’s body was badly burned and partially disintegrated. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The family will receive guests at 6 p.m. Feb. 10 at Bigtime Funeral Home. The burial will take place at 10 a.m. Feb. 11 at Bigtime Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Cure Cancer Research Facility...

  I frowned. Died in a fiery car crash? I wondered how the Bullucis had pulled off that lie. They must have paid someone in the coroner’s office to look the other way. Or perhaps one of them had some sort of psychic power or mind-control gizmo. It didn’t really matter how they had done it. Only that they had.

  I kept reading. The obit went on to detail James’s life and his work at the helm of his family’s company, as well as his many contributions to Bigtime charities. The local media had covered the funeral, of course, since the Bulluci family was so prominent in Bigtime society. I’d been out of town on a business trip and hadn’t gone to the funeral, but I remembered Sam talking about attending and what a sad day it had been.

  I stared at a picture of Johnny with his arm around Bella, comforting his weeping sister. Johnny’s mouth was set in a hard, tight line. Even though the picture was in black and white, his eyes practically glowed with fury. The casket stood in the foreground. It was closed. Not surprising. If Intelligal had killed James Bulluci with explodium missiles like Angel claimed, there wouldn’t have been enough of him left to put in a spoon, much less a casket. Died in a car crash, my ass.

  After the funeral, there were no more mentions of James Bulluci or Johnny Angel. For a while. Then, about a month after the funeral, SNN reported an Angel sighting at the Everything Electronics Store in downtown Bigtime.

  Wait a minute. That name sounded familiar. I closed my eyes and thought back. That was one of the places Siren and Intelligal had hit during their crime spree. I remembered because we’d gone tearing after them when they’d robbed the store, but we’d lost them in traffic. All Siren had to do was crook her finger, and twenty cars had slammed into each other. I snorted. Men. And people thought women drivers were hazardous. Please.

  I kept reading. According to the television transcripts, Angel had shown up just as the reporter was leaving. That’s why we hadn’t spotted him that time, but he’d been tracking them even then.

  I wondered how he did it. And how he’d known the ubervillains were in the factory a few days ago. Did he sit by the police scanner at night like the newspaper reporters did? Or did he prowl the streets like the roving crews for SNN? Maybe his father’s old motorcycle gang friends had given him the heads-up. Perhaps his grandfather helped him. Or even Bella. She had to know the family secret. She might even have some sort of power herself, since Johnny did. She was probably too uptight to use it, though.

  As the months went by, more and more sightings of Johnny Angel were reported. He always popped up where Siren and Intelligal had been, sometimes missing them by minutes. Occasionally, he’d save somebody from a burning building or chase off some would-be rapists, but he spent most of his time hunting the two ubervillains. Trying to get his revenge.

  Revenge. Johnny wanted revenge on the ubervillains for killing his father. I couldn’t blame him for that. When I’d thought Travis had committed suicide because Carmen had exposed him, I’d wanted to tear her into little pieces and feed her to the fish in the marina. My father had to slip me sleeping pills for a week before I’d calmed down enough to even think about letting Carmen live.

  When I learned that Malefica had actually murdered the man I loved, I’d gone ballistic. If I could have gotten my hands on the ubervillain, I would have ripped the skin from her body an inch at a time, sewn it back on, and started all over again. And again. And again. So, I didn’t begrudge Johnny his revenge. I understood the need for it all too well.

  But in the end, revenge wasn’t as satisfying as it seemed. There had been plenty of people and ubervillains who had done me wrong over the years. Caveman Stan, the Undertaker, Frost, Carmen, Malefica. Some of them had gotten their comeuppance and then some. Caveman Stan had been buried alive in a cave-in. Frost got attacked by his own monstrous creations. Malefica had disappeared into a vat of radioactive goo.

  But it had all been so hollow, so anticlimactic. Oh, the idea of revenge tempted you with its sweet, deadly song, whispered sly promises in your ear. But it didn’t bring back the person you loved. It didn’t change the past. It didn’t heal your hurt. Revenge only made you feel that much more empty inside. At least it had me.

  No, Fiona Fine didn’t begrudge Johnny Bulluci his revenge. But as Fiera, the superhero, I was honor-bound to stop him. I was in the business of saving lives, not taking them. Not even the lives of ubervillains the world would be better off without. It wasn’t for me to decide who lived and who died. That had been one of the first lessons my father had drilled into my head when I’d decided to become a superhero like him. I might be powerful, but I wasn’t God. And according to Carmen, karma took care of everybody in the end, good and bad. From what I’d seen so far, she was right. Bad things had a way of happening to bad people. It might take a while, longer than it should, but in the end, you got what you dese
rved.

  But if I stopped Johnny from taking his revenge, things would end between us. I knew his secret, what he did when he thought no one was watching. The knowledge would only fester and rankle between us until the connection we had turned into something sour and rotten.

  I didn’t want that to happen. But I couldn’t ignore my calling, my duty either. And I didn’t know if I could risk telling him the truth about me, about what I did when no one was watching.

  So what was I going to do?

  *

  I sat in the library staring into space, brooding, and eating candy bars until the others came in around eleven that night.

  “Fiona, is something wrong?” the chief asked, his green eyes bright with concern.

  I licked a bit of caramel off my finger and shoved the binder over to him. “Oh no. Nothing. Nothing at all. Everything’s just dandy. In fact, I’ve been reading up on a good friend of mine. Johnny Bulluci. Aka Johnny Angel.”

  My father froze, his fingers hovering over the binder. “Johnny Bulluci is really Angel? Are you sure?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Henry said, his glasses gleaming in the dim light.

  I shook my head. “Unfortunately, I’m not. It’s all there. Read it for yourselves.”

  Henry and the chief pored over the pages, while I told them about Johnny’s watch and all the angels floating around the Bulluci household.

  “You found this information yourself?” the chief asked Lulu.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been getting pointers from Carmen. She’s right, you know. It really is easy to figure out who you guys are.”

  “It makes sense,” Henry said, pushing his glasses up his nose. He leaned over his computer and started to type. “Each Bulluci generation has had at least one son in it, and we know Johnny Angel is a generational superhero/ubervillain. Not to mention the fact that one of Bulluci Industries’ specialties is the production of custom motorcycles. It all fits together. The secret identity, the business, everything.”