“Hi, Mom,” Ozella said, her mom coming in for a side hug.
“And who’s your friend?”
“Sam,” he told them, not yet ready to unleash his nostrils on her parents. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Rose.”
“Call me Ozzie,” Ozella’s mom said with a smile. She had blonde hair like Ozella, but looked tired, puffy bags under her eyes. “My name is Ozella too, if you hadn’t already figured that out. But I have always gone by Ozzie.”
“Nice,” Sam said, not sure if there was another way to acknowledge this bit of information.
“Well, I’m cooking something for Dad, so if you want something too, let me know,” Ozella said as she turned to the kitchen.
“I don’t need anything to eat,” her dad reminded her, biting down on his sandwich.
“What about your friend?” her mom asked.
“We just ate, and he needs to look for something in my room. He’s interested in some of my Kingdom Cards. No big deal.”
“Seriously, Ozella, I can just eat the sandwich,” Ozella’s father said as he followed her into the kitchen.
“Nonsense! This will only take a few minutes, Dad.”
“So,” Ozzie said, looking to Sam.
“So,” Sam replied, his nostrils flaring.
And in that moment Sam knew exactly what had happened.
He didn’t need to go to Ozella’s room, he didn’t need to snoop around her childhood home any further. It was clear as day, but Sam wasn’t confident enough in his ability to make a final call, so he took another inhale, smiling at Ozella’s mother as he did so.
“I should probably hang this up,” she said.
“You know, I can help you,” Sam told her. “We’ll be able to find the cards later. You need any help?”
“With hanging clothes? I’ve been doing it for a good forty years…” Ozzie said, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, makes sense.”
“But you know what? Sure, I have a bunch of clothes that I was going to take upstairs anyway, so you can help me grab them. Come with me.” Ozzie nodded Sam into the living room, where he confirmed that she had been ironing clothes. Not only was the smell of the fabric in the air, but the ironing board was planted squarely in the center of the room.
“Grab that stack, and follow me,” Ozzie said. Sam lifted the shirts and pants that were resting on the couch. Some of the stuff was male scrubs, and the rest belonged to Ozella’s mom, who worked in administration at a local high school.
With the clothes so close to his body, Sam wasn’t able to utilize his olfactory power, so he simply mouth-breathed until he got to Ozella’s parents’ bedroom.
“She really is helpful,” Ozzie said of her daughter. “You know, she’s made so many meals for us. I don’t even remember when she learned how to cook. She must have been five when she started helping in the kitchen. Her father has a pretty crazy schedule, and while my schedule has normalized over the last several years, it was pretty hectic when I was younger.”
“She makes excellent food.”
“So you’ve eaten her food?” Ozzie asked him.
“Yes, she cooks for me and our roommates.”
Ozzie paused. “She’s living with a boy?”
“Actually, we are living with two other women. I’m dating one of them. So…”
“So?”
“Yeah, so nothing’s happening there. I mean, nothing to be concerned of. You have a great daughter,” Sam said, trying to cut the awkwardness with a smile.
Now that the clothing was on the bed and he had stepped away from it, he took a big whiff of Ozella’s parents’ bedroom. A lot of details came to him in that moment, things that he shouldn’t know, things he did want to know, but the detail he was looking for had been confirmed yet again.
It all made sense now, creepy sense, but sense.
Chapter Twenty-Two: All This to Say “They Got Dressed”
(Still boycotting Chapter Twenty-One. Sorry-not-sorry.)
“I don’t know if you should tell her or not,” Helena said as soon as she and Sam were alone.
They were back at the mansion, all four of them, Zoe taking a shower, Ozella cooking a high-protein dinner, Helena and Sam alone in her room.
Helena had already shared that Donovan was indeed using a warehouse owned by a man named Dick Moonstar, a former member of the board. She assured Sam that this had been her plan all along, that she had already hypnotized him, and was now using him for information.
The point was, they were going to need to pay a house visit to Mr. Donovan, and they were going to need to do it soon.
Which was exactly what Vigilante Justice was planning to do.
“Yeah, I mean, maybe it won’t be such a big deal once I tell her. I really don’t know. Would you want to know?”
Helena shrugged. She draped her arms over Sam’s shoulders, bending down to kiss him.
He didn’t even know when they’d got into this position, it had just sort of happened. Not that he was complaining.
“She probably won’t care,” Helena said. “And to answer your question, I would want you to tell me. I think. Well, maybe it’s better if she doesn’t know. Shit. I see your dilemma here.”
“At least it is pretty easy to lie to Ozella, not that that is necessarily a good trait of hers. When she asked me what I had discovered, I just told her that her parents were working too much, and that they needed to take a vacation. Which is kind of true. Those two work around the clock. Her mom is an administrator at a local high school, but she’s also in charge of all the activities for the second-year students, which keeps her pretty busy. Her dad is a nurse, but he’s moved up the chain of command to the point where he is on call all the time. From what I could tell, they actually treat him more like a doctor, even though he hasn’t officially earned that title. So vacation. Those two could really use a vacation.”
“Okay,” Helena said, cocking her head to the right for a moment.
“What are you doing?”
“Arranging a vacation for them,” she said. “Bryan will be in touch with them with a number of packages paid for by me. There are a lot of options, and my parents have a ton of travel hookups that the normal person wouldn’t normally have. And I’m not just talking about hotel discounts here. It’s a really big world, you know that?”
“Wait, have you been to any of the other countries?”
“Of course I have. My parents travel more, obviously, but I’ve been to all the countries in our world at least once. Well, the West and the North when I was a child. But I have been to the Southern Alliance plenty of times, to the capital city of Argoze.”
“And the East?”
“Maybe a decade ago. It’s pretty out there, lots of trees. There are definitely some eye-opening locations in our world that many know little about.”
“Well, giving them a vacation would be nice, but I don’t know. You think Ozella would be okay with that?”
“Bryan has already reached out to them and offered them several options, so it’s a little late now…”
Sam laughed. He placed his hands on Helena’s ass, moving her just a little closer to him. They were sitting on her sofa, Sam looking up at her, the urge to get busy definitely causing a stirring in his groin. “You move fast.”
“Did you already forget that we got engaged the first night we met?”
“What I don’t understand is why you go so fast with me, but you seem very level and balanced as a CEO…”
“Level and balanced?” Now it was Helena’s turn to laugh. “That’s just something I project. I have the same insecurities as everyone else, and the role that has been given to me is something that is incredibly difficult for me to get a grip on, at least most of the time. It’s actually why, or at least one of the reasons, I started going out on my own and doing hero work. I just needed a change, something different, something that didn’t involve the boardroom and a bunch of uppity assholes.”
“Is that how you would descri
be the board of the Knight Corporation?”
“No, I can think of other, better adjectives to describe them. Anyway, enough about work. We need to go over the plans again for tonight.”
Helena got off Sam’s lap and sat next to him, reaching for a piece of paper that was sitting on a nearby side table.
“This is a schematic of the building that Donovan is currently holed up in. I don’t believe anything has really been changed around inside, so our best bet will be to enter through the front, go right up the stairs after we’ve dealt with the guards, and greet him.”
“You’ve already discussed this with Zoe, right?”
“We came up with a plan together earlier, when we were training. We will have to get you and Ozella on the rooftop, just as backup, but I don’t think they’ll be too much of a problem with Lance around.”
“And I’m supposed to just hear what’s going on?”
“Pretty much. It’s best if we don’t all four go in there at once—five if you include Dinah. You three will serve as backup, just in case things get out of hand. The goal of tonight is to not let things get out of hand. I would love nothing more than to get the information we need, and either act on it tonight, or if it’s happening sometime in the future, finish our trip to the spa. I really would like to finish that spa trip.”
“Yeah, that would have been nice,” Sam said, recalling their trip to the private spa just a few days back. It was too bad that someone had been trying to rob one of the businesses below at the same time they were getting their chill on.
A damn shame.
“And let’s wear our alternate uniforms tonight, the ones with lime green stitching. I think I will have another pair made as well, so that we have three.”
“I’ve got no qualms about that,” Sam said as he saw Dinah move through the door.
“Looks like we’ve got company,” Helena said, waving at the blue ghost woman. Dinah smiled, did a quick twirl and a funny dance where she shook her hips, Sam’s eyes zeroing in on her ass as she turned around.
“I think this is her way of telling us that dinner is ready,” Sam said, “but I’m not fluent in ghost talk.”
Helena laughed. “We get it,” she told Dinah. Helena stood and did a little dance herself as she made her way over to Dinah.
This only inspired Dinah to dance even more, the ghost woman now doing a move with her arms over her head as her breasts jiggled, something that Sam was pretty sure was called “jazz hands.” It would have been weird anyway, but the fact that she was nude only made it stranger.
After another spin, Dinah pressed back out through the door. Sam assumed she was on her way to Zoe’s room. His assumption was confirmed when he heard Zoe shout out in anger through the wall.
“Let’s go,” Helena said, still laughing at Zoe’s high-pitched yelp.
“Good, I’m starving.”
***
Dinner was as scrumdiddlyumptious as usual, Ozella whipping up a gourmet spread of roasted pheasant, charred carrots and rosemary potatoes, a cream cheese gravy and some dessert dish made out of buttermilk that Sam had never tried before.
He was glad they had another hour or so before they went after Donovan, Sam needing a little time for his food to digest. What was even stranger was the time that he burped, his own burp meeting his nostrils and giving him more information about the food they had eaten than he wanted to know.
Like the fact that the pheasants were butchered inhumanely.
But there was nothing he could do at that point aside from wave the smell away and get back to chilling, Sam in his own bedroom, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed beneath him. He just wanted to kick it for a moment, but he knew if he moved to the bed that he might actually fall asleep, a post-dinner nap, which he was hoping to avoid.
His eyes were closed, Sam mentally going over the plan for tonight. While he knew the basic operation and he had seen the layout of the place, actually mentally visualizing every aspect of the plan was not so easy.
His mind kept drifting off to the things that he had experienced in his past, some of the action the team had gotten into since its formation, memories from his childhood. Most the memories from his childhood centered around Sam wanting to be a hero.
During most of his classes in secondary school, Sam could usually be found drawing epic stick figure battles centering around heroes. They were pretty elaborate as well, at least for an eleven-year-old, Sam always making his figure red so it stood out better.
It was delusional, and at the time, he was pretty sure he didn’t even have a dormant power aside from the occasional enhanced sense of smell, but Sam couldn’t help but wonder what a younger version of himself would think now.
He was on an actual exemplar team, albeit an illegal one, with a codename too.
And they didn’t use their codenames enough, and he was planning to do that more in whatever they encountered in the future. Nosy; Ballerina; The Human Shield (a name that didn’t quite fit Ozella, but it was her choice, so they went with it); Tiger Ears—what a bunch of badasses.
A knock at the door startled him, Sam jumping to his feet as Ozella entered, a tray in her hands.
She wore her superhero schoolgirl uniform, this one dark blue with lime green stitching, which for some reason made it look even tighter than her other one, her mask the only thing missing.
“I thought you could use some tea, for digestion and to give you a little boost of energy,” she said as she set the tray down on a side table.
“Sure, tea,” Sam told her.
“We’re leaving soon, you know that, right?”
“Aware,” he said as she poured him a cup.
Ozella handed it to Sam, whose nostrils flared as soon as he placed his hands around the cup. His sniffer told him how the tea had been grown through the guidance of an intelligence-based exemplar. The same exemplar had infused it with electrolytes and vitamins that helped to sustain energy and aid in digestion.
“Thanks, I needed this,” he said as he brought the beverage to his lips.
“I figured you would. It’s you and me tonight,” she told him.
“What?” Sam asked, looking at her funny for a moment. “Yes, that’s right, and we will have to be ready for anything. I will have two wrist guards, you will have one, and we will also have Dinah. That should be enough in case we have any guests on the rooftop.”
“Hopefully, we will get the information we need without having to do any fighting. Not that I’m opposed to combat.”
“Yeah, hopefully. It would be best if we could just get in and get out with the information we need. But we have to be prepared for anything. Especially if the shipment of infected children is supposed to go out tonight. We still don’t have that information, and if the night is tonight, we will have to act on it. I’m just hoping that we have a day or two’s lead time to gather more intelligence and train.”
“Hopefully.”
Ozella stepped out, leaving Sam to his tea. He drank it quickly, feeling more energetic with each sip.
Once he was finished, Sam got suited up, able to zip up the back of his uniform on his own.
He equipped both wrist guards, one with an energy weapon and the other with an energy blade. He also strapped on the telepath band. He didn’t activate it, however, knowing that he would need to do some communicating with Helena once Zoe and she were in.
They hadn’t really thought this part through, as usual, but how were they supposed to prevent the reach of a telepath and at the same time be able to communicate telepathically? Unfortunately, and at least for now, it was more important for them to be able to communicate than it was for them to prevent telepathy.
If everything went according to plan, this was an in and out mission. They would get the info they needed, and then they would skedaddle.
He could only hope things went that smoothly.
Sam pulled his mask over his face and brought his hood up.
He stepped over to the mirror and took
a look at himself, feeling fresh to death in his new superhero duds, dark blue, lime green stitching, the mask perfectly cut to frame the outline of his nose and provide nostril access.
He could smell the costume, the years of training that Maria, their costume designer, had put herself through to be the best in Centralia. She was a Type IV Class E, an intelligence-based super who clearly had a knack for aerodynamics and design, but she had also spent years honing the skill that she already been granted naturally, putting her a leg ahead of other exemplar uniform designers.
And in the future, Sam would ask her to do even more, possibly put add-ons on their uniforms, better ways for them to address whatever threat may come their way. But for now, this would do, and it was about this time that Sam heard someone call his name.
He stepped outside his bedroom to see the other three waiting for him, all looking hella fly in their matching uniforms.
Zoe’s had what resembled claw marks along her ribs, her tail poking out the back, and more claw markings just beneath her ass cheeks; Helena’s was perfectly cut, with the same vertical, suspender-like lines that ran down the front and met at her vajayjay, the lime green stitching forming a thong of sorts at the back, even if her legs were actually covered by dark blue material; and Ozella looked the same as she had before, aside from the fact that she now wore a mask that matched Helena’s.
“Wait, I thought you two were dressing as businesswomen,” Sam said.
“We are; we just wanted to see how the new uniforms look on us,” Zoe told him.
“Well?” Helena asked.
“They look awesome. But if you guys weren’t ready, why did you call my name?”
“What part of my first statement do you not understand?” Zoe asked, frowning at her ex. “We wanted you to see what we look like in the uniforms. Now we’re going to change into our business attire. Is that okay with you?”
“Easy, easy,” Sam said, his hands coming up. “I was just curious.”
Zoe and Helena both retired to their rooms, Zoe walking past Sam, her tail lightly flitting against his cheek.
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