Collateral Damage

by Steve Beaulieu

  She could feel it in the air, he was aware of her plans. The voices of the ball attendees, their laughter, the enchanting music, would drown out the sounds of him destroying one of his own, a night child. Cara rushed through the library door to find him seated before a great hearth. He sipped a glass of fine liquor, his demeanor calm yet his eyes spoke otherwise.

  “Sister of shadows.”

  “Olon.”

  “So the rumors are true?”

  Cara didn’t answer; she knew she didn’t have to.

  “You wish to destroy your father?”

  “You destroyed my blood father.”

  “Since when do you care so much?” he asked.“After ten years of being my child, you have suddenly grown a heart?”

  “I’ve always had one.”

  “He would have only given you a life of suffering.”

  “As if you’ve given me something more?” she asked.

  His coal black robes made him appear like a storm cloud as he glided toward her.

  “You are one of only a handful of souls who know where my true power lies.” He raised a hand to a bookshelf with polished brass doors. “Your name was never inscribed in it because of your fierce loyalty to me. What happened to that?”

  “You stirred up the ghosts in me, voices you should have never made me remember.”

  “I see, this is about the incident in your former neighborhood.”

  “Much more than that!” Cara answered, drawing the gun from her hip.

  “There is a line. Once you cross it, you can never return!” His voice boomed.

  “You crossed that line already,” she answered and tightened her grip on the gun, her finger ready to pull the trigger.

  Father Olon held great power, yet he was not immortal. He held up his hands. Cara could see his mind calculating the risks of trying to disarm the sister of shadows—a killing machine he created and nurtured into a merciless force. Cara felt all her anger rising up through her gut, it pained her heart before running like a bolt of electricity down her arm and into her finger. She was ready to end him.

  “Stop!” a voice hailed her.

  Figures rushed in.The night children had found her and were being led by Bailan herself.

  “You can’t kill the master,”a small voice spoke. The young ones gathered around their false father and the fear in his face faded into a grin.

  “She is a traitor. You know the fate of traitors here in the Altars of Night,” he said.

  “You’re right, father,” Bailan answered, drawing a knife from a hidden sheath in her velvet dress. Her eyes roved over Cara who trembled with rage yet refuse to lower her pistol.

  Bailan spun quickly and sent the blade straight into the forehead of Father Olon. Disbelief followed by pain filled his face before the blood flowing over it and filled his staring eyes. He fell to the floor, sprawled out on an antique rug, death carrying his wickedness to some other world. The other children fell on him, their fists and daggers punctuating the end to their pain and forced slavery.

  “In the darkness of the catacombs, I thought about my life, as short as it has been, and decided what I really longed for most…a mother,” Bailan said.

  The night children rose to embrace Cara, the mother of shadows and new ruler of the Altars of Night. Cara kissed their foreheads before making her way to the bookcase. She opened the Tome of Life and watched its pages glow with unearthly fire before speaking the names of any of her children who were bound by the book, releasing them.

  “You may all stay here with me, of your own free will,” Cara said.

  “What will we do now?” Bailan asked.

  “We have a whole city at our command. I say we make it our own,” Cara said, smiling.

  The voices in her mind fell silent and her heart felt a spark of happiness she’d never known. Her empire awaited…

  A Word About Michelle Garza + Melissa Jason

  Thanks for reading Altars of Night. We are a twin sister writing team from Arizona. We’ve been dubbed The Sisters of Slaughter for our work in the horror genre but we also love writing science fiction and dark fantasy. Our debut novel, Mayan Blue, was nominated for a Bram Stoker award in 2016.

  FIXING SNIPER GIRL

  BY JON FRATER

  FIXING SNIPER GIRL

  BY JON FRATER

  The young man stared at the older, taller, wider man—the man with the gloriously resplendent costume who made him feel utterly small—and gulped.

  “Kyle Richards.”

  Kyle sat up straight. “Yes, sir!”

  “Don’t sir me, son, Arch-Angel is fine. Everyone calls me that, you may as well too.”

  “Sorry, Arch-Angel. I’m a little nervous.”

  Arch-Angel lived up to his name, even here in a plush office in the Angels’ HQ building. The window behind the well-known superhero showed the midsection of the Chrysler Building. That impressed Kyle. Midtown real estate was pricey and had a well-known billionaire not decided to fund The Angels, chances are they’d be operating somewhere much less expensive. Kyle wondered what other expensive tastes the team had that he didn’t know about.

  “You’re a military man, aren’t you?”

  Kyle blinked. “Five years with the NSA, three with the State Department as a foreign attaché. I did poorly as a grunt, so they moved me into intelligence. The rest is on my resume.”

  “It’s a good resume, son. Is there any language you can’t speak?”

  Kyle inhaled, counted to five and let it out before continuing, He dared not screw this up. “Short answer, no. Long answer, if I can face the person I’m dealing with, in video, on paper, face to face, then I can communicate with him. Or her. Computer languages are the real challenge. Talking to a machine is a different order of complexity but I’m getting there. I make my living coding trading algorithms for the big banks. It’s fascinating work.”

  “It’s good money, too, I’d guess. So, why come to us?”

  Kyle counted to five and laid it out. “Frankly, sir, I’m rich. Not one percent rich but set for life with a house, car, and no mortgage rich. Whenever I talk to one of my clients, I wonder how much money they need to have to make themselves feel safe or adequate or happy. The numbers are staggering. I’m looking to give back to the city.”

  Arch-Angel leaned back in his chair and laughed. “That’s admirable, but it’s nonsense. Why are you really here?”

  Damn. All right, time to come clean with his backstory. “I worked with the Samson Squad for ten months. They had one guy I managed to connect with—a dude a little younger than me, called himself Dimension Rider. Went around closing rips in the space-time continuum. And since we had a beginning magic–user on staff, holes had a way of showing up at the worst time. Well, after a while, those two came to blows, there were unfortunate consequences—a hospitalization—and I decided I’d had enough.” He shrugged. “The Angels sounds like a more professional group.”

  “That sounds unfortunate. How long did you stay in the hospital?”

  Sigh. “Two days. You can’t even see the scars anymore. I heal quickly.”

  “Thank heaven for that. At any rate, a position here doesn’t pay much. The danger is real. SCRAM is constantly on my back for going over-budget…but…we’ve been working on federal cases as well as local ones. The government’s checks clear, and I think the feds would respect us more if we had a man who could track down leads the way you can. And having a perfect translator on the team, in a city that speaks a hundred languages, I’d call that an asset.” Pause. “Interested?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Arch-Angel looked him over. His mask covered his eyes but the visual sensors flickered. Finally, they stood and shook hands. “Welcome aboard.”

  • • •

  Two weeks into the new gig, Kyle wondered if he'd made a major mistake. The team members seemed off. He understood that he lived on a different part of the superhero spectrum from his teammates. He couldn’t link his brain to computers like Braintrus
t, wasn’t super strong like Strongarm, couldn’t fly like Arch-Angel, or melt minds like Psy-Block, when she wasn’t melting down on her own. Epileptic seizures were a hazard for her; if she pushed herself too hard…boom. The team dealt with it but they couldn’t seem to deal with him.

  It was the whispering. They were polite enough to stop whenever he came into the room. A few Angels even tried to be solicitous. The chatty pleas from Braintrust to help her kids with their French homework, the time when his new boss came into the cafeteria at break-time and asked Kyle to handle calls from bank officers a few times a month.

  It was stressful. It brought back memories of dealing with the financial guys on the Street. At least back on Wall Street, he’d been raking in cash in exchange for his soul.

  Strongarm’s arrival on the team, shortly after his own, burned the point home for Kyle. Thaddeus “Ted” Armstrong was seven feet one inch tall, a veritable wall of righteous dude who’d worked in Harlem, the South Bronx, and any part of Brooklyn where hipsters hadn’t taken over completely. He sounded like anyone else over the phone, a rich, dark baritone. When he arrived in person he’d gotten stares. Arch-Angel blinked and quickly recovered, and the others followed his example, nodding and smiling and patting Ted on the back.

  A week later, Ted walked into the break room and stared at the brand new team emblem on the wall: URBAN ANGELS.

  Arch-Angel beamed as he did a short ta-da move. “New logo. Cool, huh?”

  Strongarm folded his arms and stared for what seemed to be a year. “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “I joined the Angels. Who are these Urban Angels?”

  Kyle watched from the rear, near the soda machine. For the first, time he’d noticed that the machine was new, too. A new flavor had been added: orange.

  The boss forged ahead. “Us. Two new team members, new name, new logo. I leaned on the marketing jerks until they relented. It looks awesome, doesn’t it?”

  Ted sighed, sat, and insisted that his boss sit as well. It looked to Kyle like a meeting of kindergarten teachers, big bodies hunched over tiny furniture. “No, man. It’s not awesome. It’s inappropriate as hell.”

  “Inapp…wait, how?”

  Ted reached over, gave Arch-Angel a brotherly hug with one arm. “Look, I love y’all like my brothers and sisters, but for five years this group was The Angels. Right? Your language dude arrives and it’s still the Angels. I show up and two weeks later you change the name to the Urban Angels. Why do that?”

  “But inclusivity is a big deal. People care about that. We’re trying to help spread that message.”

  Ted nodded and carried on. “I’m down. But we don’t discriminate in who we chase and catch. Bad guys are bad guys. And they don’t all live in the slums…we work the suburbs, too.”

  Arch-Angel seemed genuinely confused. “All right, I get it. But—”

  “And yeah, there’s crime in the inner city. Blaster Man and Shock Therapy take care of that beat.”

  “But, I think—”

  “In no way am I going to lead a strapping flight of the most pale-faced people I know and trust into that neighborhood to step on those brothers’ toes.”

  The boss frowned. “Come on, man, we—”

  Ted stood, stretched, and rested his hands on his hips. “Dude, I grew up in Rutland, Vermont. If there’s a whiter town in this country, I’d like to know where it is. We’re the Angels. That’s that. Or I go. Yes?”

  Archangel shook with repressed…something—anger, embarrassment. Kyle didn’t need superpowers to see the boss was pissed off. He wondered if anyone had actually told him ‘no’ before. “Yeah, we’ll figure out something else.”

  “Thank you, my man.”

  Strongarm eventually acquiesced to The New Angels which kept the truth of two new team members but kept the original image of New York City crime fighters intact.

  A bigger problem was what to call Kyle. Perfect translation skills didn’t lend itself to a catchy name. Braintrust suggested “Polyglot” and it went downhill from there. They finally agreed on “Crypto, the Man of a Thousand Voices,” which Kyle bitterly tolerated. He got them to shorten it to Crypto before the final press release went out, but while at home the whole team called him One-Kay. It wasn’t a bad nickname, despite the vaguely gangsta vibe it held for him. Kyle Richards couldn’t pass for a rapper if he tried.

  Fieldwork was worse. Kyle found constant reminders of his technical failures in the world of super-powered combat. A thousand phones uploaded a million photos from crime scenes: Crypto hiding behind a tree. Crypto being blown two hundred feet into the air by an explosion. Crypto ducking behind a minivan while his buddies faced down all manner of super-villains. Crypto being kicked in the shin by a nine-year-old little girl.

  It got old.

  Honestly, he could have forgiven his teammates, but he couldn’t forgive himself. He was the freak here, not them. He didn’t belong. And he heard the whispers constantly:

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Gah, can’t we leave him home this time?”

  “Can’t we just re-assign him to another team?”

  After two years, Kyle had had enough. Being brilliant and out of the line of fire was neither satisfying nor helpful. He needed to not be humiliated on a daily basis. He wanted out. He made a few inquiries, got a call back from a previous co-worker at SCRAM, and got an offer from the military.

  Then, he left.

  • • •

  Two years later, Kyle Richards worked in a dark room, deep in the E-Ring of the Pentagon. He rented a sick apartment in Langley and didn’t mind the commute. His bank account was beyond flush. He had access to the entire spectrum of federal policy wonks and an open line to the intelligence types at the NSA and SCRAM. The SCRAM line never rang. The NSA never left him alone. In the few short hours between assignments, he did what he could to funnel work to the New Angels. He wanted to contribute somehow.

  When the SCRAM line did ring one Thursday morning, he took notice. “I have a Thaddeus Armstrong wants to see you. Are you available?”

  “I am. What’s he want?”

  “He has a Class B order with him. I’m sending him through.”

  “Got it.” Kyle spent some time wondering how Ted had gotten onto SCRAM’s A-list without Arch-Angel knowing about it…or whether Arch-Angel had sent him, then locked up his files and cleared his desk. He collapsed back behind his desk just as the door swung open.

  Strongarm ducked down to avoid hitting his head of the door frame—or taking out a piece of the wall. He kept his face neutral as he looked for a place to sit and settled for standing as he took in the meager government issue surroundings. “So, you look busy.”

  Kyle leaned back in the chair, looking up at his friend. “Busy, yeah. Can’t really talk about it…security and all that. But the pay is pretty good and I got medical and dental, so…” He shrugged. “Why’d you wait so long to visit, man?”

  “Why didn’t you? Your passcodes to the building still work, you know.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “Truth is, boss man didn’t have the heart to lock you out. He figured you’d come back one day.” Strongarm frowned, unslung his backpack, and laid a folder on the desk. “It’s official. We need some help with a case. To be honest, we’re stumped on how to work this one. Can you take a look?”

  “Which case?” Kyle glanced down at the search window he’d opened. Lots of crises, as usual, but one stuck out. “I see the Vice President is in town to chair that new anti-terrorism initiative. He bought two of the Joint Chiefs with him. And they appear to be staying at a hotel that’s just two blocks from the one Angels’ HQ.” He looked up. “Arch-Angel send you?”

  “He did. He thought it would be better if I made the pitch. But it’s not that.”

  “Bossman passed up a SCRAM paycheck? That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Oh, we’re on their security detail. Arch-Angel and I are working the rooftops while the ladies
mind the office. It’s just not what I came to talk to you about. For real, man. Take a look.”

  Kyle stared at the file. The SCRAM logo sat like a wax seal of old, an official communication from a great house. SCRAM’s global war with SCYTHE was legendary, even though the New Angels were never actually involved, and only tangentially funded by SCRAM. Still…

  He pulled the folder close. Black and white glossy photos spilled over the desk as he shuffled through the material. One, in particular, grabbed his attention—a young East Asian woman frowning into the camera. The frame didn’t include anything lower than her shoulders, but Kyle didn’t need his powers to tell that she’d been heavily restrained when it was taken. It was the way her jaw was set, how her shoulders and biceps bunched up, like a turtle trying to retreat into its shell. “Who is she?”

  “We don’t know, but she’s killed six foreign dignitaries in the past two months and assisted at least three other assassinations over the past year. She talks in code. One of the psych guys thought she might be really autistic. Braintrust wasn’t so sure.”

  “I wouldn’t try to diagnose a spectrum disorder from a few stills, even if I had a medical degree. It’d be better if I could see and hear her. You got videos?”

  “Nope. You want more, you have to come back to Manhattan. We’d pay you.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Strongarm settled into the one empty chair in the office. “I know, you’re not into money. Admirable AF, man. Arch-Angel can’t always get his head around that issue. Having enough is not his style.”

  “I think that’s the most critical thing I’ve heard you say about him in two years.” He paused to think about the ramifications of Strongarm’s presence. “You’ve already got her in custody, don’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then why do you need me?”

  “Because none of us can understand what the hell she’s saying and the Secretary was specific: if we can’t figure this out, they’ll transfer her to SCRAM and let them deal with it. They might find something, but they’ll rip her apart in the process. And then any hope of tracing her back to square one goes out the door. If there was ever a case you needed to be involved in, this is it.” Strongarm offered his hand. “Back on the team? For a few days?”