Accelerant

by Katelyn Beckett

"A relief," he sighed, opening his box. "Right. Relief. She was planning to break it off with me anyway. I found a journal."

  What the hell was I supposed to say to that? "I'm sorry."

  "She wanted to go be with your sister."

  "Uh," I answered, absolutely poleaxed. "...Double sorry?"

  Nate shook his head. "If they're happy together, that's what matters to me. Right now, I would assume that they aren't, but there's only so much we can do about that. I just wish she'd had the courage to talk to me about it instead of me finding out after she attacked everyone here and broke my heart."

  "Speaking of," I said, tossing one box in the trash and grabbing Cassie's. No reason to let the food go to waste. "Do you remember anything from attacking us?"

  "I did what?"

  I put the box back down. "You attacked us. Me and Cassie. You were with Lexi in the hallway and I had to smear you across the floor a few times before it actually registered to you that you were supposed to stay down."

  He tossed his box in after mine and met my eyes. "I remember waking up on the floor in pain. There was a hell of a lot of blood and not much else. No memories, no recognition. Then I heard what was going on, so I went out to try to help stop Isabella before things got too bad. And I got my ass kicked again."

  "Seems to be your gig, Sav," I said. "You're only so big and tough. Besides, you can do all that cool shapeshifting stuff and I-"

  "You want to give up flying to be a shapeshifter?" he asked, his brows raising.

  I shrugged. "We all want something different than what we've got. Besides, you can fly."

  "If I want to realign my guts to do it."

  "Eurgh," I said, leaning forward. Like a kid poking a dead snake with a stick. "Is that really what you have to do? You have to think about organs and-"

  Nate cocked his head at me. "Depends on the animal. Some aren't too different from humans. Others are." His eyes drifted to the last box of food. "Can I get the sausage out of that?"

  "Knock yourself out," I said, tossing Cassie's box, too. He snatched the links from the box, then offered me the rest. Pancakes 10-15 sounded amazing, so I ruined that container of them, too.

  I watched as the sausage disappeared in an instant and noted that his teeth were just a little sharper than they had been moments ago. Fur appeared on the back of his hands, like a bad werewolf comedy sketch. The bone grew heavier slowly but surely, until he was halfway through a shift.

  "You okay there?" I asked.

  "Mm?" Nate asked, in some sort of pork nirvana. He looked down at himself and sighed, the fur vanishing as quickly as it had sprouted. "Sorry. Sometimes the meat brings on certain urges."

  "What kind of urges?"

  I held my breath for a moment as he lifted his head and frowned at me. Yeah, that hadn't been the way I meant for it to sound, but we were two guys stressed out of our minds. And that mind tends to wander to fulfilling, self-gratifying places when you're feeling down and alone.

  Besides, what was he going to do? Pee on my car?

  "Feral urges," he said, thoughtful. I leaned forward to better listen. "Tear apart a deer. Climb a tree. Run a mile in the night and rip my claws down a building just because I can."

  He paused, then he, too, leaned toward me. "Fuck like an animal."

  Well, it wasn't like we were getting anything else done tonight. I grabbed him by the back of the head, tangled my fingers in his hair, and kissed him as hard as I could. The chairs tipped and over we went, down onto the floor of Edwin's nice laboratory. Clothes? Who needed them? The rest of the Alliance building thought the lab was locked at that hour.

  "You don't strike me as the type, Creed," he growled down at me as he snapped the button off my jeans.

  I kicked him in the gut and knocked him across the room, got up, then stalked back across to him. There was brief confusion in his gaze until he realized. A game. An act. If he was going to call me my alias, I was going to treat him like a villain.

  And I had little doubt he was going to love it.

  I grabbed him by the front of his ripped shirt and pulled him to his feet. "You don't either."

  He reversed the pressure on my arms and forced me back. Together, we fell into Edwin's couch with him on top of me. I wrapped my legs around him and rolled us both to the floor again. Astride him, I regretted the jeans. I could feel every inch awaiting me through his thin shorts, pressing up against my groin.

  Too long. It'd been so, so long. Since before Cassie had been released. I-

  Damn it. Had the conversation about Nate cleared something like this? We'd spoken about her feelings but was she... had she given any of us permission to be that rebound she didn't want to be?

  My hands waivered at his belt and I paused. He frowned and took my wrists. "What is it?"

  All the play was gone from his voice, worry evident in his features. I looked around at the mess we'd made; couch cushions on the ground, the chairs knocked over, boxes simply everywhere. I leaned down and sighed at him. "Cassie's got a thing for you, you know."

  "She does?"

  "Yeah. And I'm with her. And I don't know if her having a thing for you, and sharing me and Edwin, makes this okay or not. I don't know... where she'd really draw that line, Nate. Things are...open-ish? But..."

  "There's open and there's closed," Nate said, sliding out from under me. He started to rebutton his shirt. "We get her back. We talk to her. I had no idea she had something in mind for me. ...Or, you, for that matter. You into this rough... stuff?"

  I shrugged. "I can rough you up worse than you can rough me up, pup."

  "Yeah?" He chuckled. "You have no idea what I'm capable of."

  He paused, then gave me a smile that promised the sorts of things you read about in those 99 cent books online. "But you can find out."

  "After we get Cassie back and once I get permission. Once we figure out where you two stand, too," I said, idly wondering if my new phone came with an e-reader app.

  "It's complicated, huh?" he asked.

  I sighed. "Isn't everything these days? Sorry to... you know, lead you on. Get you all hyped up and then... nothing."

  He waved it away. "It's fine. But you'd be one hell of a rebound."

  "For who?"

  Edwin entered the lab looking exhausted. Had he walked all the way from the hospital? Surely not. I got up and walked over to him, wrapping my arms around him in a bearhug. "You look like shit."

  "Anyone would after the things I've been hearing," Edwin yawned. "Scribe's stuck for at least another month, maybe more. Why is everything all wrecked up in here? What the hell have you two been doing?"

  Nate pulled himself to his feet via the couch's armrest. "Thinking about ruining soft, sweet little blonde guys who just got back from the hospital."

  I smothered a laugh as Edwin pulled away from me. "He's about as straight as you get, Nate."

  "Straighter," Edwin said, sitting down at his computer after righting the chair once again. "If you two are doing things like that, you need to do it somewhere else. I have far too much delicate equipment down here to risk it."

  And then he saw the message on the screen. The demands, the list of names; all of it. Mutely, he reached over and grabbed the nearest box of remaining pancakes. He opened it up, unsheathed a plastic fork, and ripped a chunk from them. He looked back at the two of us and raised his brows as he chewed.

  "You just got out of the hospital," Nate said. "You in a hurry to go back?"

  Edwin lifted his shoulders in a shrug and tore off another piece of pancake. His gaze drifted to me and I felt as though I was being x-rayed. There I'd been, rolling around on the floor with someone else after we'd seen that message on the screen. I was a terrible boyfriend, an awful normal friend and-... was I?

  Everyone is entitled to a little stress relief now and then. It was practically a movie and book trope. A bad thing happened and then the two main characters were busy plowing each other like a field.

  I wasn't living in a movie or a show
or a book. And Cassie wasn't going to come back from this if I wasn't more careful. I added another hundred lashes to my anguish and sighed at him. "We'll come up with a plan. A good plan. But we need someone like you to manage it for us while we're out there getting our asses kicked."

  He waited until he finished the entire box of pancakes to nod, put the box down, and turn back to his computer. "Let's go."

  Chapter 10

  We slept on it.

  The three of us crashed in the lab that night. With the threat hanging over our heads, the risk we took not reporting it to the head office (in truth, I wasn't even sure who was up there. Simply that -someone- must be manning the phones and doing all the PR, but they didn't know us the way we knew each other.), and everything else? No one wanted to use the elevator or go all the way upstairs.

  We slept in a three-bodied huddle on the couch, each of us dozing off until noon or so.

  The guys, the knuckleheads that they were, kept stewing over our current situation. I, on the other hand, decided to be a little more forward-thinking about it all and lock myself in the bathroom to cry. I'd been released from the hospital for less than a day and already my girlfriend was missing. Couldn't we have just a little time to gather ourselves and be ready for stuff like this to happen?

  There is a certain amount of morbid anticipation one has when your significant other is a superhero. There are plenty of risks, lots of rewards, and things that fall in between those two categories. The risks, however, were perhaps the most important at the moment. Kidnappings happened. Violence happened. Sometimes, superheroes didn't come home from their nightly shifts. When you were with a superhero, you accepted these sorts of things as a risk you were willing to take.

  And, honestly, both Cassie and Adam were worth it.

  I was just so tired.

  What would I be in 5, 10, even 20 years? Had I wanted to start a family, what would happen if Cassie got torn away like this again? Or what if our kid had superpowers?

  Look, it was early on in the relationship but these were the sorts of things you asked yourself when your girlfriend got stolen in the middle of the night.

  I wiped my eyes on my pajama sleeve, ignoring the Mickey Mouse ears marching up and down in pinstripe-styled lines. I turned off the fan, got up, and walked out of the bathroom in an orderly fashion. Nate and Adam waited for me outside in the lab. I knew they did. And I needed to be ready and willing to talk strategy that might get all of us killed.

  Maybe I really wasn't made for that type of work, thinking about it. I'd overseen a million missions in my time, but the risk was usually a superhero getting killed or a supervillain getting away with it. How often had I been taught that superheroes were, somewhat, expendable? Save them if I could, but the general public was the important thing.

  And they agreed.

  But Cassie was different. Adam was different. Nishelle was different.

  And maybe Nate was different, too.

  I squared my shoulders, let out a long and measured breath, then walked back out into my laboratory and tried not to let the others see how shaken I was.

  "Problemo numero uno," Adam said, holding up a finger. "We have no idea where anyone is. That message could have been sent from anywhere, by anyone, right?"

  "It's possible," I admitted as I sat down at the console. "But it's unlikely. I'll run what I can on the IP that sent it and see if it's local, at least. But with VPNs and so many other ways to hide your signature on the internet? I don't know what I'll find. And even then, I wouldn't trust it very far."

  Nate shook his head. He wore only the shorts he'd picked up from whatever slightly damp cache he'd used. I could still smell the faint scent of mildew around him. "Not good enough. We have to nail this down before they realize we're coming for them. If you can't find it, no one can. But if you can't find it, we're going to have to go into this blind."

  "Scribe would lose his mind if he had the slightest inclining of what we were about to do. It's incredibly dangerous. What if whoever's holding them is just using them as bait for the two of you?" I asked.

  There was a pregnant pause as Adam and Nate looked at one another. Then Nate took a deep breath. "If that's what it is, that's what it is and we'll deal with it when we get there. It doesn't matter if they're after us or you or the girls. Between the four of them, they could tear apart the general world order."

  "If Cassie had her powers," I said.

  "If Cassie had her powers," Nate agreed. "But if they can take away powers, surely they can do something to her to fix whatever's broken, right?"

  Adam shook his head. "I don't know about that. If there's technology out there like that, we pay the hospital enough for the wing that treats us to know about it."

  "The Alliance pays enough but it could be some kind of... nefarious contraption or something," Nate said.

  "'Nefarious contraption'," I repeated, my voice mild.

  Nate shrugged. "I didn't want to use words too big for Creed."

  "And you settle on nefarious contraption?" I looked back at Adam. "Go get breakfast, both of you. Bring me something back. I'll get to work on this and we'll see what I can do while you're off."

  There was a general murmur of assent and the two of them left. I watched Nate leave, still in what amounted to a pair of boxers, and sighed. Some men had no sense of modesty. I turned back to my keyboard and began the work that would ease the process for us or confirm how ridiculously difficult the rescue was going to be.

  A half-hour later found me still trying to crack all the numbers of the IP address. Over and over they scrambled, re-scrambled, and deleted themselves. Whoever had done it knew their business, I gave them that. What a frustration it was to keep from driving my fist through the computer screen.

  Adam and Nate were still busy stuffing their faces in the rebuilt cafeteria. The one good thing to have come from Isabella's betrayal? We had a taco bar full-time now, situated just inside the door. There was a pizza warmer next to it, too. Stop by, grab a pie, run back to your room to do whatever the hell superheroes did at late-o-clock at night. Fantastic.

  Mostly I was just thankful that the Alliance building had re-opened to us shortly before Adam had been released from the hospital. Imagine being allowed to go home but not having a home to head back to.

  I continued with my struggles, the boys in a picture-in-picture window on my rightmost monitor as I worked. It let me know when they were heading back, what they would grab me, and all those other little details that would make me seem like some kind of Psychic. Always weirded people out. Kinda fun to do it.

  When they left, I still hadn't managed to get the entire string of numbers out of the system, but I was very close. The initial set said the code was indeed local, it was from a tiny town just outside of the city. Though that didn't confirm anything, I wasn't aware of any local VPN that worked from that area. Unless someone was running a private one, I assumed it was real.

  That meant whoever was playing games wanted to remain close by for some reason. Maybe I was right. The boys could be the next targets by our perp. Or maybe they'd take a strike at the hospital and drag Scribe out kicking and screaming. I doubted the latter; if they'd wanted Scribe, they wouldn't have had Melody sling him into that substation. And we'd all been in the hospital long enough to be captured, killed, or otherwise harassed if that was what they wanted.

  No, there was more to it than that. I just couldn't figure out what it was.

  "I got you the snootiest food I could find," Adam said as he walked in and put a bag on my desk. "Yogurt, oatmeal, and that sugar-cured ham that you like so much."

  A little twinge flickered in my chest. I looked up at him. "You know about the ham?"

  "You were overjoyed at the hospital. I thought you'd be interested in it at home."

  On the third day we'd been allowed real food at the hospital, they'd served us sugar-cured ham on potato buns. The rolls had been terrible, but the meat? God, it'd been like the second coming. I'd moaned thr
ough every bite and practically licked the tray clean of the mashed potatoes they'd brought. It'd tasted like heaven in a time I was certain I was locked away in hell.

  I opened the bag, pulled out the ham, and kissed his cheek. A friendly way, not something flirtatious. Let him figure out what to make of it. And the way his brows raised? I had no doubt he'd be turning over every thought and curiosity in his head while he did whatever it was we'd have need of him doing by the end of the day.

  "Bad news," I told them. "I don't think I can hunt this down by myself. I have a couple of friends I can ask in different Alliance buildings, but I don't know how tight we want the security on this."

  Adam sighed as he flopped down on the couch once again, "We don't know who's safe and who isn't. Probably best not to play around with this."