by Angel Payne
Except now that I put it that way, the “old” story doesn’t sound old at all. Or very much like a damn fairy tale.
Yes, even this part. With the “courtiers” all gathering at the “castle” in their finery, what better cover can there be for a hag wanting to stow a couple of kids down in the dungeon again?
Not. Going. To. Happen.
But for that pledge to be reality, we’ve got to find the selfish skank before she goes to ground.
We’ve got to find her now.
With my mind and heart surging a rush of new commitment to the pledge, I ignore the hand Reece reaches in to help me disembark the car. Instead, with the help of a pushing pulse, I practically fly out the opening, using my extra two seconds to crush my lips to his in a kiss that’s filled with fire, fervor, conviction, dedication, consecration, and every ounce of consuming love I have for this incredible superhero knight of mine.
As soon as we part, me wearing a stupid grin and him looking like a full train has burst up from the purple line and struck him, I chuck him lightly on the chin. “Let’s go get this hag, Sir Reece Richards.”
“Uh…okay?”
But that’s a hell of a lot easier said than done.
As if the paparazzi have special hearing devices coded for Reece’s voice, we’re suddenly bombarded by a huge flock of the buzzards. While it’s never an easy thing to suddenly feel like one is in the middle of a fish bowl with two dozen tweaked fireflies, I do my best to join Reece in giving them all the charming smiles and poses they want. Anything to keep their prying lenses away from Lux, who’s scooted up the steps to the plaza by a fast-acting Trixie. Thank God Reece didn’t give her shit about wanting to come along on the mission. The strength in our numbers gains its best evidence when we have to deal with obstacles like this lens monkey—and twenty of his buddies.
“Hey, EmRee!” shouts one of the photogs. “These are great shots. You two look like a million bucks.”
“Two million.”
“Which might be the bonus my editor flips my way when she sees these. You two do have all the superpowers!”
“Our pleasure to help out, guys,” Reece answers. “But if you don’t mind, we’re meeting some friends before the performance. We haven’t been able to locate them yet, so—”
“Huh?” someone in the pack cuts in.
The guy already celebrating his bonus adds an adamant nod. “Didn’t you already find them, Emma? Over by the Lipchitz fountain? Like, ten minutes ago?”
My heartbeat thuds in my throat. “M-Me?” I squeak—already slamming all the pieces together and trying not to betray the fury that’s spouting inside me just like the spouts of the Center’s iconic fountain.
“Yeah,” he answers. “You. Over there. You must have found your friends, right? Were those little girls theirs, then?”
“Little. Girls.” I get the words out but aren’t sure if they’re even intelligible, considering my mouth is full of bile-filled marbles. That bitch is still parading around as me. Letting the paps take pictures of her, Mis, and Ira!
“Yes. Right.” Thank God for Reece, who’s a thousand times better than me at pulling together his shit in the middle of a media circus. “We just meant…other friends. It’s, errrmmm, a big night for the city. Everyone’s here tonight! Wow. Did Taylor Swift and Katy Perry both come dressed as the black swan?”
As soon as the pack races each other back toward the step-and-repeat backdrops, he scoops up my hand and sprints up the stairs. I’m right with him, not breaking pace as we get to the main plaza level. The towering Lipchitz sculpture, called “Peace on Earth”—too damn bad I don’t have time to conjure some meme-worthy one-liners at the moment—is at the center of two hundred miniature water jets.
At least it was.
Until the second Reece and I skid to a stop in front of the thing, joined within seconds by our son and the rest of the team.
At once, everyone gasps—except Lux, who couldn’t be more excited—as Reece blankets the water jets beneath a sizzling force field. And then pulls all two hundred of them out of the ground.
And then twists the whole grid until it’s vertical.
And then turns all two hundred of those jets into actual jets. As in, vertical blue cylinders wrapped in sizzling blue electrical currents. As in, two hundred superpowered missiles primed and ready to launch.
Three, two, one…
“Time for the bitch to get bolted.”
Reece growls it before pulsing into an arcing leap…and then hurling the glowing tubes down the walkway that leads to the Center’s other two theaters. Both the Taper and the Ahmanson are dark tonight, meaning there’s only a few landscaping and engineering employees over here.
Along with a woman who looks exactly like me.
Running like hell. Dragging two little girls dressed in tutus.
A freakish experience in its own right, though there’s no time to dwell on it. I’m still focusing on my husband and how he’s started spinning the tubes in midair. Along the way, he twists and turns and manipulates them to “borrow” pieces of the steel furniture and cement buildings that they pass. Heat-molding the extra ingredients—until he’s strengthened the two hundred tubes into just ten large poles.
Just ten poles?
Correction. The columns would make Scottish caber tossers look like toothpick jugglers—though it’s hard to believe they aren’t just toothpicks by how Reece handles them. With more eye-popping strength and grace, my husband twirls the poles around in midair, repositioning them into a vertical circle. As we all watch with stupefied gapes, he lowers them back down to the terrace with deafening whamps…where they’re transformed into a trap for a fleeing madwoman and the girls she’s taken hostage.
Two innocents who, judging from the happy singing we can hear thanks to the breezeway’s acoustics, are still thinking they’re getting to see Swan Lake instead of their new holding cell. Probably not so much now, since their sweet song has been replaced by the pounds of the poles and the sizzles of the electric arcs between them—such a scary contrast, my protective instincts urge me to pulse-vault myself past Reece and then run toward the cage as fast as I can.
I almost stop when realizing every member of the team has followed me, but when Atticus and his guys storm in from the other end of the passage, I’m filled with a new—and likely false—sense of security. Nothing about guys in military-grade gear should be the automatic recipe for breathing easier, but I have a feeling the musketeers are capable of handling the hellfire on this skirmish if that’s what it comes to.
This skirmish.
Dear God.
Have I already doomed us to one just by thinking it? Then again, I’m not the one who stole two children for the purpose of re-enslaving them. Once again turning them into the stress management cans for a pod people army—so every one of them can help out with giving human evolution a not-so-gentle nudge. It’ll be fun, gang. Like art class. If you don’t like the picture, erase it and start over.
Only this lunatic bitch wants to do it to the entire human race.
And she’s started the war by going the wrong way.
By duplicating…me.
I’m still at least ten feet from the cage when she spins around, hands splayed on the girls’ throats, a rabid snarl redefining her face.
My face.
“Oh, holy God.” The exclamation belongs to Trixie, because my convulsing throat can’t manage air, let alone words. The cutoff makes me dizzy until I have to gasp, but even that’s nearly too much. Fresh oxygen means confronting full thoughts—and facing this bizarre reality.
Gaping at myself.
A seething, raging, degraded me. A desperate, driven, beaten me. A me who’s been manifested through the filter of fear instead of the choice of love. Who shows me, with gut-twisting explicitness, the deformity of what I could be—in a world where I haven’t chosen beauty. In a universe where I haven’t trusted in love.
“Mama?”
I snap ou
t of my transfixion, shooting a dazed stare at my airborne son. I’m beyond stressing about whether the paps see him or not. A superhero kid who can fly hardly feels like the big story when a real-life Orphan Black is playing out at ground level. If even one stranger barrels up on this scene and thinks the real me is the one inside the bars…
Yeah. This bullshit needed to be diffused five minutes ago.
“Mama?”
A truth expressed, in all its raw agony, by my sweet little Miseria. I know it’s her, along with the hundred other ways I’ve learned to differentiate between the girls. Outwardly they’re identical, but in the last week I’ve started to learn their souls as well. All the little things that make them unique people in their own right. All the special ways I’ve come to claim each of them as my dazzling, amazing, extraordinary daughters.
My daughters.
I’m already grasping the miracle of it with my mind, but beholding their faces, locked with wide eyes and O-shaped mouths as that bitch imprints her filthy fingers across the columns of their necks, I know my soul is suffused with that truth as well. Every corner of my heart sings with it. Every instinct in my body is ready to fight for it.
And yes…if I must…to kill for it.
Regrettably, this isn’t going to be that simple.
To win the game against this witch, I’ve got to dance to a few bars of her tune. I already hate myself for it, but getting my children back is worth every agonizing second.
“Well.”
Faline cocks her head, emitting a sardonic chuff. I have to admit, the look is one of my cutest. “Well, well, well.” But she’s instantly back to being ugly, her lips twisting and her nostrils widening as she rivets her cautious gaze fully on me. “I must admit, you’ve got a snappy bunch here. You all figured this out quicker than I thought.”
I mirror her little look, likely to the letter, but am heartened to see the slices of recognition in both the girls’ eyes. If Faline’s neck-snapping grips didn’t give her away, I know that this face-to-face has confirmed the truth to them, once and for all. They know me. They feel my energy. Most of all, they recognize my love.
“Don’t underestimate yourself.” I want to hurl after handing her even half a compliment. “The move was daring. Impressively so.” Yep. The Taper’s reflecting pool is about to have chunks of floating barf. I have to swallow several times to keep the bile from coaxing it all up my windpipe. “But as you already can see, we’re snappy—and you’re trapped.”
The bitch tosses her head back, gushing out a laugh. But when she lowers her face, it’s not fast enough to hide her truth. At the edges of her neck, along the outer undersides of her jaw, I watch the shell of my skin peeling away, exposing the porcelain flawlessness of hers again.
I’m getting to her. Maybe just a little—but it’s a start, and I’ll take it. Any edge right now is a weakness that can possibly be exploited…a fear that can be drawn out…
“Trapped,” she echoes. “So that’s what you’re calling this?” She chuckles again, and I fight not to betray how it wigs me out. I didn’t exactly wake up this morning and brace myself for the weirdness of hearing Faline Garand speak and laugh through my lips. But dealing with that chunk of Freaky Friday isn’t as crazy as watching what’s happening to her now. Our battle is clearly diverting her energy from maintaining the face morph, and she’s losing her grip on me as if she’s left a cosmetic mask on too long. Parts of my face are falling away from hers in growing flakes of faded color.
The freak show isn’t easy to surmount—but after looking at my girls’ terrified faces again, I’m willing to converse with a talking pig if I have to. At this point, I think I’d actually prefer the swine. “It’s time to cut the shit, cariña,” I spit. “Trapped is exactly what you are.”
“Hmmm. Well.” She attempts a breezy head flip, but the move loosens half my nose and the majority of my chin. “Perhaps that is how you say it in snappy land—but from where I am standing, it seems you have secured me inside a tiny little circle with my pretty, perfect treasures…”
“Not yours!” I go at her with furious steps and balled fists, though they’re both already casting several inches worth of a dark-gold glow. I’m ready to freaking melt the rest of her skin off her disgusting bones if I have to.
“And who stole what from who, my little querida?” With her incensed snap, I’m on higher guard but also greater consolation. The peels on her neck have crept up both sides of her face. At this point, I’m beyond the creep factor of the sight. The sooner my visage isn’t on top of her skanky little body, the better.
“So you want to go there with this?” I rebut. “Fine by me. You milked Tyce Richards for half these kids already. And sure, that still makes you their mother—but I’m not sure any court across the whole globe is going to sit well with learning a mother forced her children to live in an underground bunker, being used as emotion-suction machines so she could invade and then hijack human minds.”
“Minds I would not be able to hijack if the human race were not so pathetically weak!”
“Not your call to make, bitch. Ever.” I take two more huge stomps forward before parting my stance into a forceful A-frame. I square my shoulders. Hike my chin. Bring my hands up, curling them into defined, fist-sized suns. Their intensity doubles with heat that bursts out in a six-foot-wide perimeter—all the way up to the edge of the cage. “Not a call you were ever intended to make!”
The witch cackles out another laugh. Her derision is longer and louder this time, making me grit back the craving to push forward, reach through the bars, and simply melt the rest of my face away from her. And as long as I’m at it, the real one underneath too. But Faline’s already handling the first task for me. In bigger and faster sections, my features are falling away, and her own evil, odious features are emerging from beneath. Her thin lips, no longer plumped by all-day lipstick, are an angry line that looks drawn by a three-year-old. Her skin is taut and pasty. Her hair is a sweaty, dirty mop. Her eyes are couched in dark-gray circles. The only life in her face is the glitter of insanity still clinging to her dark irises—which shine even brighter as she looks out over all of us, laughing long and hard again. The bitch might be silently conceding the first battle, but she clearly still plans on winning the war.
And right now, I’m not certain she’s completely wrong.
With my two girls still securely in her grasp, the woman cocks her leering gaze with renewed confidence. “Ohhh, sweet little Emmalina,” she croons. “Still so full of all that righteousness, are you? Along with him?” She jabs her chin toward Reece, who steps up next to me at last. I have to admit that I’ve wondered where he’s been, but the answer is clear after one glance—and it’s not one I expected.
Holy shit.
He’s exhausted.
Not just figuratively.
I even dare a surreptitious double-take just to be certain of it, because I don’t think I can remember a single occasion over the last three years when I’ve seen his pallor this pale, his vigor so draggy, his steps so plodding. But fortunately, I think I’m the only one who sees all of it. He’s making the plods look like stomps, and every one of his fingertips is still sparking with blue combustion. I just hope we don’t need to really blast Faline to pieces. Or even to pulse a piece of paper her direction.
“Do you two really think you are changing the world?” At the moment, we’re safe, since Faline is devoted to spouting the idiocy of her manifesto. If her ramblings keep her here in front of us, still with Mis and Ira scared but unhurt, then I’m willing to let her have it for a few catchy bars. “Do you think you are doing anything but being the glorified criminal clean-up crew?” She snorts at what’s clearly her idea of a joke. “Team. Bolt.” Both words get her official stamp of Fa-Fa scorn. “One day you will be able to even buy the billboard for yourselves.” She rolls her head as if reading said billboard. “‘Proudly tidying society’s messes for twenty years.’” A new snort. “Or…you can choose to see it my wa
y, team.”
“Sure.” Reece’s retort is delivered on a full growl, and my chest is infused with hope. Maybe he’s recovering faster than I first thought. “You mean the way that turns functioning people into your waggy-tailed puppets?”
“Puppets who are happy!” Her eyes gleam like she’s about to morph into a damn bear. With matching wildness, she claws Mis and Ira backward until their heads are trapped in her armpits.
“But robbed of everything that makes them people.” Reece grits the last word and maintains his vicious countenance while moving in front of me. If Faline is going for the bear angle, then he’s set on fighting back at full dragon mode. His gaze crackles with lightning blasts. His hands are curled like reptilian claws, looking ready to send out sci-fi laser balls. But can he? Or is this all for show, to keep her here and talking? “Don’t you get it, woman?” he finally growls, shaking his head. “If you do this, you’re no better than your own parents.”
Faline’s fire completely drains from her.
But only for two seconds.
After that, her fury is back at double its force—twice its violent emotion.
“How. Dare. You.” And with that triplicate of snarls, three times its destructive conviction.
“No, Faline.” My husband holds fast to his position, both physically and figuratively. “How dare you.” I struggle not to wince as he carefully balls his hands back together, one quivering finger at a time. He’s still flirting with danger by feigning his force, but there’s not a thing I can do about it. Not right now. Not from where I’m at. “You got short-changed in the decent moms department, woman. For that matter, the dads too. But their dissatisfaction with their lives had little to do with you—and even if you don’t believe me and succeed in creating a super race of every perfection there is, there are going to be humans in that gene pool who aren’t ever satisfied. They’ll be that way because they’re human, and we’re all hardwired to seek more, to crave more, to want…more.”