Accelerant

by Katelyn Beckett

  "Oh come on," he frowned.

  I bit into it like a wild animal and tore a chunk away, daring him to fight me for it. Edwin rolled his eyes, stacking three thighs atop his plate. "I don't know where the two of you put all those calories, but one day it's going straight to your hips."

  "Fuck my hips," I said through a mouthful of bird.

  "Maybe later."

  "I don't think anyone's doing anything like that for a while," Adam said, pulling the rest of his white meat to him. "We aren't even out of the hospital yet."

  Edwin dipped a strip of meat directly into the communal gravy and raised his brows at him. "The door has a lock."

  "And Scribe's two feet away from us," I said. "Ew."

  "I'm just saying," Edwin shrugged.

  He could say all he wanted, but the fact was that he still couldn't walk across the room. Only recently he'd been able to get himself into his own wheelchair. The doctors were certain that he would recover, but how long? And what would the cost be? No one could give us a straight answer and I couldn't help but think it'd worried him. People like Adam and I were used to getting the shit knocked out of us and taking a week or two to recover from the really bad spills.

  Edwin wasn't. He dealt with superheroes, he wasn't one of us. Sure, he'd proven himself in the middle of battle by shutting Melody's powers down, but he'd still been roadkill by the end of it. We'd all been pancakes on the ground, honestly. Then the flames leapt to life and-

  I took another bite of my chicken and tried to think through it. Things were foggy. I knew that the fight had gone badly, that Scribe had been electrocuted profoundly and his being alive was an absolute miracle. The doctors had said it enough. Yet, the thing I kept focusing on was Nishelle.

  My girlfriend was alive.

  I'd done five years in jail for a crime I hadn't meant to commit; one that I hadn't actually committed after all.

  And there I was, settled on a bed with two men who adored me and I them.

  But my girlfriend was alive.

  And I loved her... ...didn't I?

  I glanced over at the flowers, the petals just beginning to wilt after a week of them sitting on the bedside table. There'd been no communication from her since. Were they a final farewell? I didn't know.

  "Can we talk about something?" I asked.

  Edwin grabbed the remote and paused the movie. I shifted uncomfortably as Adam finished off the breast he had in his hands. He swiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and tilted his head at me. Fly boys. I swear. "Is this about Nishelle?"

  I blinked at him.

  "We already had that talk between ourselves, Cassie," Edwin said.

  I frowned at Edwin. "Which talk?"

  "If you want her instead of us, we understand. Just... you just need to tell us and we'll buzz off."

  "Are you kidding?" I said, looking between them. "No. No, of course not. I haven't spoken to her in forever. I don't know who she is anymore. She doesn't know me. I don't dare think-"

  Adam pulled me back against his chest and looked down at me. "If you didn't dare think whatever you were about to say, you wouldn't be asking us for permission to go chase her down."

  I nestled back against him, always feeling at home in those big, strong arms. I curled up there, small and safe. They were the one place I felt like the world wasn't out to get me when I'd gotten out of jail. Edwin's laboratory had been another sanctity of reclaiming who I'd been before I was behind bars.

  Now they thought I was done with them. Fat chance.

  "It isn't that. It isn't any of that at all, and when we're well, I'm kicking both your asses for thinking that," I said, smiling. Something like hope flickered in Edwin's eyes. Had they really thought they meant so little to me? "But if she and I still hit it off, if we are what we were... I'd need to talk to her, too, of course, but would it be possible...?"

  "Three's a crowd, four's a party," Adam said, clearly delighted. "If she's interested, of course. Whether she's into us or not."

  "I'm already sharing you with one super, what's another?" Edwin asked, grabbing Adam's arm and pulling it around him, too.

  I leaned my cheek against Edwin's shoulder and stole the remote from him. "If everyone's on board, then, all the better. I just wanted to... to..."

  "To get it out of the way in case you run into her soon? Or in case she shows up here asking what's going on with the boy toys?"

  "Boy toys?" I shot at Adam, wrinkling my nose.

  "Personally, I like to think of myself like one of those ride-along toys."

  "Only because you're lazy in bed," Edwin said, turning on the movie again.

  I stared between the two of them, realization slowly dawning on me. They'd been in the same room together and Edwin knew all about the door locks. "Wait, have you two-"

  "Shhh," Adam said, stroking my hair. "Movie's on."

  Edwin glared at Adam and poked him. "Don't let her imagination run away with itself. We haven't done anything and you know it. But there are rumors all over the place back in the Alliance building."

  "Bad rumors? Or the kind that make you stay up at night?" Adam asked, owl-eyed.

  In response, Edwin flushed and turned the sound up on the movie. I silenced my laugh before it left me. Edwin wouldn't appreciate that, but Adam would have run it into the ground. Curled up with both of them, I finished off my lunch in record time and watched as girl met boy, boy met girl again, and rom-com indecencies happened across my luxurious 20" television mounted to the ceiling.

  Just because we got extras didn't mean that we got huge screens to enjoy them on, but it was better than doing nothing else at all.

  And I was getting tired of doing nothing else at all. My powers weren't responding the way they should have been. Even with the electrical jolt they'd given me recently; nothing worse than touching a hotwire on a pasture fence, I hadn't responded whatsoever. That kind of pain should have been able to let me stop a car from running me over.

  I hadn't been able to throw a cinderblock 10 feet.

  That wasn't promising. I needed to start looking at options outside of the superhero business. Yes, it was possible that my powers could come roaring back any day or week. ...Or month. Or year. No one knew when a burned-out Blitzer might return to full duty, if they ever did. What had I done before I'd been cleared to run missions with the Alliance?

  "Maybe I could pick up my old job at Piper's Rotisserie."

  Edwin shook his head. "Piper's burned down two years ago. And you know they'll offer you a gig training Blitzers if you don't... I mean, I think you will, Cass. I know you will. But-"

  "What he's trying to say is," Adam said, clearing his throat. He adopted that painfully Creed vibe and I wanted to give him a wedgie. "The PTB Alliance is proud to employ the retired superheroes of our time in teaching those learning the extent of their powers and-"

  "I know I've got teaching and coaching offers, but the idea of that isn't-"

  "Exciting? It's not like throwing guys through walls?" Adam asked.

  I squirmed and looked away. "Something like that."

  "Dunno how long you intend to have left anyway, Strikeout. Gonna be an old man like me, trying to play a young person's game."

  The voice came from behind the dividing curtain. Adam and I were out of the bed in an instant, ripping it away to find a conscious Scribe staring up at us. His eyes were sunken, his mouth dry, and his skin ashen. But he was there. He was alive. And he was talking.

  "Edwin-" I called.

  He slid off the bed and, flawlessly, landed on his chair. "On it."

  Away he rolled, straight out the door and down the hallway. I looked for Scribe's call button, but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, I hit my own. "I intend, sir, to have another seventy thousand years left in me."

  He coughed out a laugh. "Could just write your powers back for you."

  "You could," I agreed. "But if you go using your abilities right now, who knows what it could do to you?"

  "Pen," he demanded
.

  I glanced at the table. Beside the flowers and their vase sat one of those cheap pads of paper and pen that you usually find in hospitals, hotels, and the such. I picked it up and paused. Did I want Scribe to put himself out for me? Hadn't he already done enough just by letting me back in the Alliance?

  But I wasn't about to argue with the boss.

  "Nishelle's alive," I told him as I passed him the cheapest stationary in the world.

  He pulled the cap off the pen, dropped it on his bed, and began to write. "Heard the news talking about her when I didn't quite wake up the other day. You all right with that?"

  Was I all right with that? I was overjoyed, enthused, excited... and a little angry, if I was honest with myself. Nishelle was alive. She could have gotten me out of prison at any point by showing the world she was fine, but she hadn't. Some tiny part of my mind tried to convince me that she was "in" with Isabelle and Lexi and, if Scribe was right, my cousin, Allison. She went by the alias Dreamweaver and was one of the only Psychic superheroes I knew that could take a punch.

  Allison had never liked me very much. When we'd played together as children, before our powers had become apparent, she'd always made me be the villain. She'd been Cassandra Clark, the most powerful Psychic superhero known to mankind. Brave, strong, loved by all, she brought me to the kitchen in yarn handcuffs several times and told my parents I was up to no good. And my parents had laughed about it, cut me loose, and told us to go play.

  My family kind of sucked. It hadn't gotten better when I'd been a Blitzer born to a family of Psychics.

  Scribe put down the pen and looked at me expectantly. I glanced around the room, then drove my fist into the wall as hard as I could. My knuckles split, a little bit, but nothing surged within me. That familiar, white-hot lightning didn't explode in my stomach or roar through my veins. Instead, there was a dull throb on my fingers and a trickle of crimson.

  "Maybe it's the pen?" I asked.

  He frowned at me, reached out, pulled me close, and slapped me across the face.

  I flinched, but nothing else happened.

  "The hell are you doing to her?" Nate snapped, walking in with Scribe's clipboard. "Her powers are diminished. They'll heal in time. Smacking her around won't help with that."

  Then he caught sight of the pen and paper on Scribe's lap. He snatched it up and looked between Lamar and I, his brows coming together and creases making themselves known on his face. "Oh. That's not good."

  "What's not good?" I asked.

  Nate showed me the pad. On it were the words "And Cassandra Clark, Strikeout, got her powers back in full that second". It was all that should have been needed. With the slightest pain, I should have been rolling in my usual 0-to-100 powers, ready to jump out the window and go punch some asshole in the face.

  I wasn't.

  Lamar was horrorstruck.

  "It isn't the end of the world, boss," Nate said. "Everything's fine. We'll be able to get you back up to speed, too. Just, you and Cassie will have to stay a little longer, relax, do some physical therapy-"

  Lamar shook his head. "My powers aren't like that. I've never been without them. Never, in all these years."

  "Trauma can have that effect on powers sometimes," Adam said. "You think maybe getting lit up like that changed something? Like, maybe you're Sparky now instead of Scribe?"

  Adam dipped out into the hallway. I frowned after him and looked back at Scribe. "I appreciate the effort anyhow. You're probably just like me. Just kinda stuck with whatever bullshit this is until you're all better."

  "I don't like it," Lamar said, his voice quiet. "It could be something Melody's done."

  "Here," Adam said, returning and rubbing a balloon on his hair. I stared at him. He smiled at me. "Static electricity, right? See, I do this and he-"

  The little bolt of lightning burst forth from the balloon as Adam removed it from his head and reached out toward Scribe with it. Lamar worked to control it, to stop it, but it leapt into his fingertips and shone beneath his skin for an instant before disappearing completely.

  Nate sighed. "Ah, fuck."

  "What the hell was that?" I asked, taking a step back.

  Adam just looked incredibly proud of himself. "He's a Zap. And they're illegal."

  There were few superpowers that were truly illegal and, to the best of my knowledge, we had dozens of Zaps among us in the Alliance. Not that I'd seen any of them since I'd been released, but there were plenty of people who had been avoiding me. I'd just assumed that they were part of that group, not that something had happened.

  "Since when are Zaps illegal? We allow freaking Pyros to practice, but Zaps are illegal?" I snapped, moving between Adam and Scribe protectively.

  Which, I have to admit, was silly. Adam wasn't going to hurt Scribe. He'd been trained by Scribe the same as I had been, treated like a member of the family for how many years? Technically, longer than I had been. It didn't matter. I felt the need to protect someone unjustly treated, for something that they had no choice in, for- ...you get the picture. I was still a little tender about the whole jail thing.

  "I made them illegal three years ago," Scribe said, his voice tired. "One of ours lost control in her dreams. She electrocuted her kids without meaning to do so. I... they're one of the few forbidden powers in the world, because of me. She's treated well. She-"

  "Never went to prison, I assume," I grumbled.

  He eyed me. "Your situation warranted something worse than an indirect punishment within the Alliance. Yours was not due to the accidental release of powers. If you'd killed Nishelle in the midst of a fight with an indirect punch that broke her neck, we would have defended you until the end of days. Instead, you-"

  "-spent five years in prison for a crime I didn't commit, boss," I said. "Because my girlfriend is alive, and now you're stuck with powers that are going to get you in trouble. It must suck to know you’re being treated unfairly. Karma's a bitch, isn't it?"

  I walked out of the room, irritated, and feeling more alone than ever. I heard a scramble of feet behind me, then Adam's low voice. Whether it was Adam or Nate trying to chase me down and deciding to talk sense into me, I didn't know. I didn't care. This was just another sleight that Scribe had pushed against the rest of we supers, and it was biting him in the ass. He'd banned everyone from coming to see me when I was in prison.

  Now who knew what the rest of his life looked like for him.

  It was nice to see some uncertainty on his part, to see him confused and a little scared. He'd been the one to decommission the Zaps? Good for him. Now, he could live with it.

  I walked until I felt better, until I'd calmed down. It was more than I could bear and I found a closet that, graciously, opened when I threw my weight against it. In between all the cleaning chemicals and the toilet paper storage, I curled up on the floor and put my head on my arm. I didn't want to go back to a room that was shared with the man that was responsible for so much misery.

  No matter how much I respected him.

  Chapter 4

  The darkness of Yarborough is something that most people underestimate. It's filled with criminals, lunatics, and those just waiting for their chance to sort themselves into one of the two above categories. I know it because I'm constantly stuck cleaning up after them or trying to stop their nefarious plots.

  Edwin got me a word-a-day calendar off Amazon while we'd been stuck in the hospital. 'Nefarious' was day one. Day two was obsfuc..something.

  One word, one day. And there was something nefarious going on with my superhero family.

  I'd been released earlier in the day, the first of our group to get out and start the long walk back home. Izzy was right about one thing, at least. We really needed to figure out a better method of transportation. Secret identities only helped so much. If someone recognized me and I'd put their cousin in jail, I was in no condition to get my ass kicked all over the place.

  "Can you hear me or not?" came a thin, tinny voice in my ear.
r />   Given the fact that I was in no condition to get my ass kicked, it was pretty stupid that I was out and suited up already. "Yeah, Edwin, I hear you. We're looking for nefarious plots and indecent deeds."

  "You're looking for Ember. Ardent. Whoever. Look, I'm stuck back here at the hospital. Anything hinky happens and I'll tell you through here. You find our golden girl and see what's going on."

  I rolled my eyes. It wasn't like I was against him giving me orders, but I knew why I was heading out on the town. "It was Scribe's decision, not yours. And when we get the lab back, you need to upgrade my speakers again. I can't hear these things."