The Gathering Storm, Part 30

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Chewing thoughtfully on his cheeseburger, Carl realized he probably wasn’t doing it thoughtfully at all. He was considering the scent of machine oil and harsh cleanser in the room. He was blaming it for how his stomach now churned. And as his appetite quickly fled, he realized that all of that—far from being thoughtful—was just a delaying tactic.

There’s something I need to deal with—there are important thoughts tumbling around in my head, but they’re something my brain knows I don’t want to face, Carl considered. So why deal with them when I can sit here and leisurely gnaw on greasy hunks of food like a cow chewing cud?

Query looked up from the fuselage of the drone he was fiddling with, and regarded the lawyer through his mask. “Are we going to get to new business any time soon, Carl?” Query asked. “Usually you plow through your two burgers in no time flat—this second one’s taking you a while. Did Wendy’s use some rancid meat?”

“More like my employer using rancid-smelling and probably toxic substances that aren’t supposed to be used in enclosed spaces,” Carl said, finally setting the remains of the burger down on the table next to him.

Query put down his tools, turned in his chair, and pushed the recently installed bulletproof window behind him up about halfway. “There’s no good angle to get a bullet through that particular window anyway unless you’re in a cherry picker, so as long as no one is waiting to lob a grenade up in here, we should be good. Can we get on with things so I can get back to this without complaints from you?”

“Feel the love,” Carl teased wearily, and regarded the compact surveillance craft occupying all of Query’s desk and extending nearly a foot past each end of it. “What’s wrong with your drone there anyway?”

I’m stalling again, he realized, because I think the new business is what will put my mind where I don’t want it to be—it’s what’s going to trigger a talk I don’t want to have.

“New Judah PD shot at it and got lucky,” Query answered. “Nothing too serious, but a pain in my ass. Seems they don’t like my eyes in the sky. Guess they don’t like the competition for the three drones they have that are twice the size of mine, half the speed and not nearly as cool-looking.”

“Well, next time they should steal theirs from the military like you did instead of settling for first-generation models,” Carl shot back, looking at his half-eaten burger and sighing. “OK, new business, then. I’ve heard from inside Fortunato’s building, but only from one of our parties: Zoe. After a few days, Fortunato finally made a job offer, and she’s got a contract to send me for review.”

“Look it over with the finest-tooth comb you have and don’t let him screw her, Carl. At least not screw her over legally and contractually. I don’t care what other kind of screwing might happen.”

“I’ll keep her safe and solidly armored by flawless paperwork. Don’t worry about that. What you should probably worry about is yourself. Fortunato finally gets your attention and now leaves you hanging for three or four days? What’s he up to, you think? Why so coy now?”

Is this what’s bugging me? Carl thought. Fortunato’s plans? No, there’s no sense of dread. What am I avoiding?

Query paused in adjusting the wing articulation controls in the drone and looked up again. “Partly he wants to make me sweat, because he’s delusional enough to think he can. Mostly he’s busy trying to figure out how to get Zoe in his camp—”

“Loc-Down,” Carl interrupted.

“Hmmm?”

“Just occurred to me you might want to know. Zoe’s codename’s apparently going to be Loc-Down.”

“Cute,” Query said. “She’s got a whole head full of locs that can punch through metal plates and tear you to ribbons when she morphs. As good as any name. Anyway, he’s busy with her,” the black-clad hero continued, “because he knows I’ll sit tight. Zoe’s slippery and he doesn’t want to let her get away. Certainly not until he puts her to work with the plans he’s hatching.”

“Which are?”

“I don’t know,” Query admitted. “I’ve got wonderful intuitive powers, Carl, but I’m not an oracle. Most likely it has something to do with his cousin that took a dive out a window. I think Fortunato wants revenge.”

“On who? Did the guy’s pharmacist give him the wrong anti-depressants?”

“No, Crazy Jane gave his cousin all the right incentives to make the leap to the great beyond,” Query responded.

“How do you figure that? Did one of your birdies see her watching his swan-dive?” Carl asked, nodding to the owl-head-shaped cowling on the desktop that Query had removed from the nose of the drone some 10 minutes earlier.

“Nah. I got hold of some video that shows her making regular visits to the guy. The images were sent to Fortunato privately so he’d know who was responsible. I knew she could unnerve people psychically as well as transmit electrical shocks, but always wondered if she had more powers, given how unstable she is. Guessing this was either some mind control in action or, more likely, she can make people lose their fucking minds. That’s in line with her name, so it seems most likely. Nasty power.”

“I thought she was being held in the Givens facility under high security.”

“You must have been hung over or out of town a few months back, Carl. She was busted out of Givens. Bloody damn job, too. A dozen dead staff or thereabouts—and they took one of the doctors there with them—hard-ass, DA-hired headshrinker named Marcus Blood. No one knows if he was an accomplice or a hostage. Still haven’t found him. Big news. Janus busted her out personally—well, with some of his lackeys with him. Those three scary killer women he’s got and a couple norm human troopers.”

“So, Crazy Jane got busted out, maybe just to do this job against Fortunato’s cousin, which means Janus is behind it all, and he isn’t just going after you but Fortunato, too. Fortunato wants your help with getting back at him.”

“Probably,” Query acknowledged. “But I can’t say for sure yet. It feels like Fortunato has something else brewing. I think he may be trying to form some kind of team, but I can’t tell if it’s just a revenge kick or some kind of vanity project with longer-term goals. I need more data. Which is part of the reason I’m even going to lend him an ear when he finally calls you up to meet with me. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest single threat to New Judah after Janus is Fortunato right now. Man has a God complex and even if he thinks he’s doing good, he’ll probably leave a whole lot of damage in his wake—eventually, his ego and greed always get in the way.”

And there it is, Carl thought, and with a sickening mental lurch, he realized he was finally in the territory he had been avoiding all along. No stopping now…

“With all due respect, Query—”

“In other words, ‘let me point something out something potentially insulting to you’.” Query said, cutting him off.

“Anyway,” Carl sighed. “No offense—”

“Same thing,” Query teased him.

“Jesus! OK, Query, what I’m trying to say is, you’re right that Fortunato has an ego bigger than the city itself, but you’re not in a position to judge somebody else’s God complex. You have a squadron of high-tech, programmable, auto-pilot mini-drones flying around the city, you’ve got a network of informants, you regularly hack into all kind of surveillance systems and all that, and you share hardly a speck of your intel with the police. You know the identities and even the damn home addresses of several costumed whackjobs and you mostly keep that to yourself. You don’t go after them yourself very often, you don’t send other white hats after them very often and you almost never share with New Judah’s finest men and women in blue. Why?”

For several moments, Query said nothing. Carl’s guts clenched, but he didn’t sense anger from the man. Bewilderment, maybe, but not anger. As the sharp cramp in his belly eased, Carl could almost imagine the hero’s eyes blinking behind the mask like a startled cartoon character. The mental image calmed him a little.

“First off, Carl, my personality gives me plenty of right to judge Fortunato,” Query retorted mildly. “If I’ve got a God complex, and I don’t—but anyway, if I have a similarly large ego and level of presumption as Fortunato—then I’ll judge him all day long. Takes one to know one, and I have enough distance from his issues to know when he’s too close to them to think straight. Honestly—and this pains me to admit—the same could probably be said of him sorting out my issues if he knew enough about me to know what I was up to.”

“So why don’t you?”

“What? Share my entire wealth of data with everyone who’s going after the bad guys, you mean?” Query asked.

“Yeah. Because you should be.” Carl’s tone was flat, but still, the sense of accusation transmitted clearly.

“Partly because I’m not God, Carl. I can’t fix everything, and I shouldn’t try to. I also don’t want people knowing just how much I know, because then they’ll start wondering if I’m more a danger than an asset to the city or, if they’re the bad guys, they’ll realize I’m even more a threat to their operations than they know already. I don’t need to be dodging hit squads like the one Janus sent on a regular basis. That shit’s tiring, and I’m getting too old for that.”

Carl said nothing. But the accusation remained.

“But in the end, it’s really about balance,” Query said.

“You think the crooks deserve to have some kind of balance?” Carl spat out. “That’s crazy. A level playing field for them?”

“Oh, hell no,” Query sneered. “It’s not about making things fair for the black hats; it’s about not adding to their numbers, man.”

“Huh?”

“Look, transhumans aren’t crazy per se, Carl, but we’re wired differently. We have issues in our heads—an awful lot of us, anyway. And some of us more than others. Let’s say I handed out my data like candy at Halloween and we cleared out most of the costumed bad guys in the city. What would happen?”

“I guess folks would come in to the city to fill the voids. That what you mean?”

“Worse, Carl. Some of the heroes and vigilantes in the city might fill those voids, too. Without suitable challenges…that is, without enemies that are like them—peers in power, if you will—I suspect some of the white hats who mostly like kicking ass or getting attention might gravitate toward the dark side. Jedi/Sith-style like in Star Wars. A lot of those heroes need an outlet—fighting folks who are like them. Without that, seizing power and misusing their power might start to taste good to them.”

“But some of these black hats are way more of a risk than the average crook, and you let a lot of them continue to run free when you could shut them down. Doesn’t that—”

“Make me feel conflicted? Make me feel like shit sometimes knowing if I’ve misjudged that someone I thought was no big deal might kill a whole bus full of children or a convent full of nuns? Yeah, Carl. My job sucks. But the fact is, no matter how big my ego, I’ve got enough perspective and humility to know that sometimes I need to let nature run its course. I need to remind myself that no one—not even me—can make crime ever go away. We all have our roles to play, Carl. A lot of times, mine is to sit back and keep my nose out of other people’s business—even when I can smell things are going to go sour.”

* * *

Although her work as an assistant district attorney took her to the main building of the New Judah Police Department on a fairly regular basis, Andrea realized this would be her first time going above the fourth floor since she had started the job two months ago. Truth be told, though, that little bit of trivia was only a minor note in her mind right up until the elevator doors opened.

Then she gasped.

The man standing in front of her in a crisp suit-and-tie ensemble might have thought she was gasping at the sight of him, she considered many hours later—he was tall and handsome enough—but what had taken her breath away was the crisp, clean, high-tech appearance of the mostly open-plan landscape of the sixth floor. The rest of the eight-story main precinct building and the other, smaller precinct buildings she’d visited weren’t that much different than what she’d seen in the city of Cleveland’s Division of Police—the offices were neither startlingly decrepit nor were they models of modernity.

But this floor looks like it belongs on the set of some science fiction show, she thought.

“ADA Yates; good to meet you,” the lieutenant said, extending his hand. She took it and gave him a light, quick shake as she exited the elevator car. “Can I get you a coffee?”

“Sure. Black. Do you have a machine that teleports them straight to you, Lt. Greene?” she joked.

He chuckled, low and slow, as he stepped around into a small reception desk and grabbed a cup, pouring from a pot just underneath the counter. “Well, a lot of the officers around here do call this floor ‘The Enterprise,’ but no. Old-fashioned brewing and pouring,” he said, smiling and handing her the paper cup as the steam from it spiraled up in the air between them. “C’mon, let me give you the grand tour. So, I know this is your first time here, or I wouldn’t be your tour guide, but I wanna make sure I show you the right things. I hear that you wanna handle a lot of transhuman cases?”

“Yeah. Is that weird or something?”

“Not at all, Ms. Yates. You see,” he said in an almost boyishly excited voice as he extended one arm in an arc to show off one half of the floor like a gameshow prize, “a lot of this floor is forensics. State-of-the-art lab computers and stuff—the actual labs and clean rooms are a floor above us. Lots of great equipment in there, but that floor looks pretty much like standard police issue architecture. Fortunato actually paid for a lot of this floor as a goodwill gesture to the city. But this—this is what you’re really gonna wanna see.”

He pointed toward the other side of the floor, and led the way to a door marked “SO/GT Div.” Opening it, he waved her in and followed right behind her. It was one of the few parts of the floor that wasn’t open and airy, and there were no windows to let anyone see into this section from the rest of the floor or see out onto the main part of the floor.

“Why do I feel like I’ve been ushered into a secret lair?”

“In a way, you have. This part of the department doesn’t get talked about a lot. I wouldn’t say it’s secret, but it’s probably best if you kind of behave like it is. We talk about it too much, and it may not work as well for us as it does.”

“As what does?” Andrea probed.

“Well, remember how Detective Sergeant Lindemann kind of read you the riot act a few weeks ago about not pushing the department to arrest transhumans on weak evidence?”

“Good God. Is he telling that story all around the department or something? Am I going to be like the village idiot around here?”

“Oh, hell, nothing like that. He’s discreet as hell. But I asked anyone in the department who feels like they have any sense of you or any major interactions with you to come and talk to me before our appointment today.”

“Why, Lieutenant?”

“So I know what your level of knowledge is and what I need to teach you about what we do here. What did Joe tell you was one of the biggest problems about arresting transhumans?”

Andrea sighed and didn’t bother to try to mask the exasperation in her voice. “Making a positive ID and linking them to a crime, since they typically wear masks and gloves—hell, whole costumes that make it less likely they’ll even drop hair as evidence. Plus some of them use body doubles as misdirection.”

“Bingo!” the detective said eagerly. “Even if you get good video, making an ID is hard, because unless the mask is pretty form-fitting, you might not even be able to use facial recognition software to match a suspect to the perp you caught on tape. And that’s why we have the SoundOff Program. That’s the ‘SO’ part of what was on the door back there. We have high-quality recordings of the voices of a lot of transhumans—criminals, vigilantes, heroes, whatever—and we can use those to match a suspect with their voice on file to help make the identification stick when we charge ‘em and you try to convict ‘em.”

With a rush of awareness, Andrea realized what felt strange about this area. Much of it struck her like it was a sound recording studio or radio station.

“But you’d only have them recorded if you’d captured them before, right?”

“Oh, no. We estimate we have voiceprints—good, thorough ones—on probably a third of the trans crooks in town, regardless of whether they’ve ever been caught or even questioned,  and average to middling quality on another third.”

“How?”

“They call us.”

“No, seriously.”

“Dead serious, ADA Yates. Dead serious. Transhumans who put on costumes tend to be the ones most touched in the head. They’re the ones who often want the attention, or why would they put on costumes and give themselves these crazy names? They love to call and taunt us right before or after a crime. Or just to try to strike fear into our hearts when they first enter the scene. Or to complain to us when the press is mischaracterizing them or we’re supposedly slandering them. And of course the heroes and vigilantes call in to let us know there are bad guys to pick up—so we’ve got them recorded and stored, too.

“Attention,” Lt. Greene continued. “The biggest mental block most any costumed transhuman has is a desire—on some level—for attention or validation. So we sometimes know the villain’s name before anyone’s even seen the creep in action in costume, and we have a voice to match to it—all because he called to introduce himself—or herself. We’ve even been able to nab a few who changed their costume and name later thinking it would help them avoid capture, and charged them with the crimes committed under their previous identity.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“We’ve had this division and this equipment—or earlier generations of it—for a decade, give or take. There are similar centers like this in Manhattan, D.C., Chicago, L.A., Dallas, Philly and Gryphon. Marksburgh flat-out refuses to adopt the technology, even though God knows they need it more than anyone else.”

“And they still call you? No one’s caught on? Surely you have to reveal to the defense and the judge that you have a recording and how it was obtained.”

“Yup.”

“Then why don’t the newer transhuman villains stop calling you and giving you evidence to help identify them?”

“Same reason people see shows on TV like CSI or Law & Order or some cheesy Lifetime woman-gets-murdered-by-crazy-husband movie and know the police have special sprays and lights that can show bloodstains that aren’t visible to the naked eye and yet still clean up all the blood and think they’re free and clear. Or rape a woman without wearing a condom. Or don’t wear gloves even though fingerprinting technology’s been around forever. They’re either dumb, overconfident or want too badly for us to realize how amazing they are. And it’s not like we go trumpeting the fact we have all these technologies—that’s why I say behave like it’s a secret, even though it really isn’t.

“But in the end, who knows?” the lieutenant continued, “Ego? Stupidity? Both? I dunno. Maybe just ignorance in some cases. Doesn’t matter, though. In the end, we have these trans guys and gals on file—and non-transhuman folks who crave attention, too, like serial killers or activist extremists. And that’s where we get into the ‘GT’ part of this division’s name. The GeneTrapper Program. Genetic material when we can get it from a crime a trans villain is known to have been at, cross-referenced with the voiceprint and with the gene records and voiceprints of known associates and enemies. And other stuff, too. But showing’s better that saying, and I’ve got some people for you to meet. C’mon, Yates—let’s show you what you’ve got to work with when you go after these costumed nutjobs.”

Barely even looking at him—her head swimming with the realization of just what kind of people she was about to start making the focus of her work and the strangeness of them—she followed in his wake.

I guess we’re not in Cleveland anymore, are we, Toto? Andrea mused as her guide continued to regale her with tales of technology and transhumans as he led her farther down the long hall. Or maybe I’m picking the wrong fantasy analogy. Maybe I just fell down the rabbit hole like Alice did.

* * *

Pushing a comic book just slightly to cover an errant view of the dull, pitted hardwood of his apartment’s floor, the man leaned back. He admired the wall-to-wall “carpeting” of his small, dingy place in the part of the city known as The Hollows—the sea of comics. This tiny place was more than he deserved, really. Crazy Jane had told him that so many times, even as she stroked his hair and called him her good little puppy. Or her bad little puppy.

In the end, both terms were usually used for the same behavior.

He didn’t deserve this little hovel furnished with nothing but two wooden chairs, a small table, and hundreds of comic books to cover the floors. He didn’t deserve Jane. But in the end, he’d played that small part in her escape because she was his world by then. He needed her. Craved her attention. Even now, he shook with stress over the fact she hadn’t been to see him since two mornings ago, and rubbed his hands nervously across his black-hooded face.

Usually, she’d visit him daily—sometimes a few times in a day—to monitor his progress. To see how he was developing.

Her art project. Her pet project.

Her pet.

And her toy.

Oh, never to play with sexually—such a thought repulsed him. Not because he didn’t desire her. He did. Oh so much. But it would repulse her he was certain. And it would anger Janus, which might cause him to be permanently removed from Crazy Jane’s attentions. He couldn’t disappoint her like that. So he would never overstep that line.

Besides, he could slake his desires on other men and women just like Crazy Jane had taught him. Just as she had molded him to do. Because she’d imprisoned the sanity that had always held him back from glory. She’d freed his mind to the wonder of what others called madness.

But it was really just truth. Problem was, most of society couldn’t handle the truth.

He admired the colorful, paper carpeting of his abode. Comics with Doctor Doom on the cover. Or Doctor Fate. Or Doctor Strange. Doctor Octopus. Doctor Light. Doctor Silvanus. And so many others.

He’d need to get a tarp today. And then a victim. Mustn’t disappoint Crazy Jane, who’d expect him to have some kind of project to show her when she arrived tomorrow. That’s why she was making him wait, probably—he’d been slack in giving her new pieces to admire. It had been a couple weeks now. He needed to find someone new to—modify.

But first, the tarp.

It wouldn’t do to bloody all these famous comic book “doctors.”

Even if his own name was Marcus Blood, M.D.

Dr. Blood.

* * *

Janus looked out through the broad window of the conference room in which he and Underworld were ensconced. Toward the figure sitting outside on a small sofa. Long-legged and busty with silver-streaked dark hair pulled into a pair of pigtails. Black, sleeveless top and plaid miniskirt. Fishnet stockings with a big pair of lacy white garters at the swell of the thighs, matching the four smaller garters on the arms, over black opera gloves. High-heeled red pumps with their own lacy garters. Face shining with pale powder and highlighted with a black circle at each cheek and equally black lips. And to top it all off, contact lenses that made the eyes look red as burning embers.

“I cannot believe you convinced me to let that on my team,” he sighed.

“Our team,” Underworld corrected him. “And you can’t deny the test results and reports. She’s everything I promised you she would be. Her powers are incredible, especially now that my team has honed them with vocal training and couple technological additions. She’s a goddamn work of transhuman art.”

“She? She has a dick. Cleverly secured back between his ass cheeks or not—a dick. That’s a man, and I wish he would act like one.”

“She already agreed to change her name from Shrill to the more intimidating Caterwaul—and go Goth for you so that she doesn’t look too frilly in a fight. And I have to admit, she does Goth so well. She’s made her concessions. I’m not going to make her dress in slacks and a button-down for you.”

“That is not a woman,” Janus insisted. “I cannot believe you are enabling this ridiculousness.”

“She feels like one, and I’m on her side,” Underworld said. “A chick with a dick, as she likes to say. Variety is the spice of life, Janus. I’ve even found a Regenerator who assures me he can get her body to start producing estrogen consistently. With that and a little cosmetic surgery help, she won’t need the padded bra anymore.”

“A fucking she-male on our team. Just what I wanted,” Janus sneered.

“She hates that term; so do I. You know, for someone who wears masks that express some kind of duality and has the name of a two-faced god, you’re awfully persnickety about sexual identity issues,” Underworld observed.

She also observed, silently, that there was a subtle difference to his mask today compared to others he had worn. The forward-facing central part of it struck her as angry and male. On each side were two other faces, one looking right and the other left. Both of them seemed feminine, with one smiling and the other’s mouth exhibiting a more neutral affect.

In a sense, he’s wearing three faces today instead of his usual pair, and it mixes masculine and feminine. A little outside his box and perhaps a sign of confusion. I do believe I’ve hit a nerve and found a new way to make Janus uncomfortable, Underworld considered. And that’s always a good thing for me.

“I’m a superpowered kingpin. I reserve the right to be a hypocrite. I just happen to believe that when it comes to gonads, you play the hand you’re dealt,” Janus said. “Or you go under the knife and change your hand to a whole new one. You don’t mix up two different decks.”

“She likes having a dick. It’s like her big, fat juicy clitoris,” Underworld taunted him in a syrupy sweet tone. “And for a pussy she has—”

“Oh, God, please shut up,” he groaned. “Will he go all the way in a fight if necessary? Does he have the killer instinct?”

“She’s sexy and pretty, not a pushover,” Underworld said. “She’ll perform. She will get the jobs done. She. C’mon…say it. Sheeeeeee.”

“It…has…a…dick,” Janus enunciated slowly. “He’s your responsibility, so just make sure he—”

“She.”

“If I start using ‘she’ and ‘her’ can you promise me we will never again discuss its sexual anatomy or who and what it sleeps with?” Janus said with quiet intensity.

“Oh, of course, my dear,” Underworld said with even more exaggerated sweetness. “That sounds just lovely.”

“Then I look forward to her proving herself. If she fails me by showing the slightest hesitation—if she crumbles at any crunch-time—I will not hesitate to crush every one of her protuberances before I kill her.”

“Fair enough, Janus,” Underworld said with a smug undertone. “You’ve gotta admit, though, she has a great ass and gorgeous legs.”

Janus sighed heavily. “In hindsight, I suppose I should have made you agree not to talk about any part of Caterwaul’s body.”

“Yeaaaaah,” she responded, slowly and softly.

“I think we’re done today,” said Janus. “Tell the others to come back in a couple days and we can finish sorting out the final roster and backup members. Hopefully, you’ll be over your gloating by then. I trust you can see your Goth-tart protégé out by yourself.”

“Of course, darling,” Underworld said as if addressing a small child, her glee at ruining his day a little taking some of the edge—a sliver at least—off her burning daily desire to murder him. “Wouldn’t want Caterwaul to get any of her transvestite cooties on youuuu, would weeee?”

“Go,” Janus snarled, then smiled brightly beneath the angry frown of his mask. “Please go before I forget how much I need to keep you around.”

The Gathering Storm, Part 25

[ – To view a list of all current chapters, click here – ]

She’d known he was coming—she’d been alerted by phone.

But apparently he’d also been warned she was on edge.

All for the best, Zoe supposed, as she heard a twig snap in the distance and a youthful, jovial voice calling out amiably, “Fringe, not foe!” as Mad Dash came into sight. The mask he wore—revealing only his nose, cheeks, mouth and chin and sporting almost comically large dark yellow goggles—was only slightly less grin-inducing than the garish short-coat he wore over his gray-green unitard, which was a medley of different colors, types and shapes of fabric. A sturdy looking coat and well-constructed, but ridiculous as hell, she thought.

God can I use a laugh right now, even if it’s only a chuckle and gone almost as fast as it arrived, Zoe considered, flinging her spent cigarette into the road from the rock on which she sat near the tree line. Before she’d fully exhaled her last lungful of smoke from that butt she was already extracting another one to light.

“Those are terrible for you, you know,” Dash told her when he drew near, though to his credit, Zoe noted, he didn’t wrinkle his nose or wave at the air to disperse the fumes like so many people did when they said something like that. “Your lungfish are going to go belly up in the aquarium if you keep up that habit.”

He delivered the cautionary note so matter-of-factly, without any trace of judgment in his tone, that Zoe decided to forego the usual snide response. “They’re right; you do speak a little odd,” she said. Then she cocked her wrist so that the smoldering cigarette stuck straight up into the air and she pointed at it with the index finger of her other hand. “Bad for me though these may be, they’re the only thing making me feel a little human right now, a little sane right now and a little calm right now. Chain-smoking several butts is phase one. Phase two will be a very long, very hot shower and lots of scrubbing until my skin is raw and any blood I see I know is my own. Phase three would be getting piss-drunk, but I can’t even hardly get a buzz drinking, so I’ll settle for some herbal tea and a warm bed and not getting up for 12 to 15 hours.”

“I didn’t bring a shower. Or tea. Or a bed,” Mad Dash said, though he glanced quickly inside his backpack as if he might find one or all of them in there, while he awkwardly juggled a large and apparently mostly empty soft drink cup from Wendy’s in one hand. He rattled it a little, lifted the lid, and then downed the last swig and let the last few chunks of ice left slide into his mouth. “I have some water bottles left in my backpack and a few snickety-snackedy-munchies,” he mumbled as he crunched the ice. “If you like granola bars and Cliff Bars and stuff.”

“I think I can keep food down now, so a granola bar sounds great,” she responded with a smile. “I’ll make Query come up with the other things to make up for letting me get kidnapped.”

After he handed over the snack and a bottle of water, he paused and then said, “Oh, salmon! Your clothes look like they came from the fall war-refugee fashion line at Macy’s and I should get you a…whoa! I’m so sorry I’m looking at you I just saw a nipple sorry sorry sorry,” he stammered, wrenching off his coat and handing it to Zoe.

“I like you, Madster,” Zoe said as she put her arms through the sleeves and buttoned it up. “You’re weird, but I like you. Chivalry’s not dead, even though your fashion sense might be. Comfy coat, though.”

“Thanks. I make them myself,” Dash said, positively beaming.

“Well, don’t give up your day job, because I think there won’t be many customers for this kind of style. But you’re a Renaissance man, Mad Dash, and you’ll make a fine catch someday.”

“Oh, I’m already the lobster special of the day—got a girlfriend named Honey Badg…hello? Yeah? Querio? Where you at, man? I’m here with Chloe…”

“…Zoe,” she corrected him.

“Zoe,” Dash repeated, and then rattled off a series off a series of “yeah’s” and “uh-huh’s” as his part of the communication with Query.

At least I hope he’s really talking to Query via a Bluetooth or some hidden headset, because I don’t want to find out he has voices in his head, Zoe thought. I can’t deal with shit like that tonight.

Mad Dash paused, then turned to Zoe. “Query says we need to stay put, stay down and don’t get involved with what’s about to happen until he says so.”

“Huh? What?” Zoe sputtered. “No, no, no. Tell Query to call me on my cell phone right now.”

“Says he’s kinda busy setting stuff up.”

“Tell him to call me on my phone right the hell now,” she snarled and then, as if on cue, her phone rang. “Talk to me. What’s gonna happen?”

“Zoe, I need you to trust me right now. I’ve got stuff to do and probably not much time to do it and I just want you and Dash to stay out of the way for now,” Query said.

“Oh no no no no no,” Zoe said, dragging hard on her cigarette and then expelling smoke in a chaotic mass like some angry dragon. “Look, I’ve had a really shit goddamn day and I’m just barely holding it together and you failed to stop them from getting me and I want some damn answers.”

“I take all my jobs very seriously, Zoe, but you’re not being charged for this work,” Query said. “What do you want? A refund check for zero dollars? I’m trying to protect you.”

“And I just killed two guys and some of them is staining my clothes and that’s fucked up and I deserve some answers,” she retorted, her voice sounding angry and anxious all at once. “Plus, if shit is about to go down, I want to know what is going down. Tell me right now or I will walk out into that road and flag down the next car I see.”

“OK, fine. Zoe, they were taking you into the woods. Must mean they have a safe-house somewhere around here. If I were running this operation, I’d have at least a few people waiting there in case there was trouble getting you out of the car. I’ve made some best guesses based on the topography around here and I’ve got some ideas of the most likely places. Also, the guys you zeroed out aren’t able to check in or respond to any communications so chances are Janus and gang will know soon shit’s gone wrong, if they don’t already. I intend to ambush them when they come looking for their friends’ car.”

“How would they find it? You had me drive it off the road.”

“I already figured Janus would likely have all the cars fitted with locators,” Query said. “Pidwidgeon’s on-board sensors have confirmed transmissions from it—someone’s likely monitoring. So I’m going to wait for them to come. I promise I’ll get you out of here. Just sit tight.”

“It’s almost dark already,” she noted.

“I have night vision equipment.”

“We don’t.”

“Dash does. And if things get too hot, and I need you to pitch in, I’ll provide the party lights,” Query said. “I promise. Now find cover, keep quiet and let me do my job. Pretty please. With sugar on top.”

* * *

He was standing in the doorway to her office. Had he been anyone else, Underworld wouldn’t have cared. But she hated him right now, and she was trying not to think of murder right now so that she could get work done. It was way too soon to deal with him again.

Not to mention the fact he never visited other peoples’ office—he summoned them to his. That disturbed her even more.

“I thought we were done after we discussed Odium,” Underworld noted.

“I may have been too quick to praise you for your successful abduction plan,” Janus said, the sourness of his tone mixing in an interesting way with the slightly tinny echo produced by his two-faced helmet.

Underworld said nothing; simply arched one eyebrow.

“We’ve lost contact with the car carrying Zoe,” Janus clarified.

“Where?”

“It was last seen getting ready to get onto Grace Memorial Highway by Breathtaker and the two men in his car when they parted ways.”

“Then I still win,” Underworld said dryly, taking her eyes off him and returning them to the computer monitor.

“How do you figure that?”

“Because if my plan had been flawed, the car would have been stopped or commandeered or whatever long before it got to that point,” she said, still not looking at him. “And the other car, too, for that matter. I assume Breathtaker and the two guys with him are still in contact and running free.”

“Yes.”

“Then the problem isn’t that I had a bad plan or that I failed. The problem isn’t that my hand-picked team got sloppy. The problem is, I suspect, that you picked a fight with Query and he’s still got tricks up his sleeve for keeping tabs on Zoe because this shit is personal and not just business.”

A loud metallic sigh, and them a simple “Hmmmph” from Janus. “I hate it when you’re right,” he said as he walked away. “I think I’ll kill somebody after I finish handling this.”

* * *

A car finally arrived nearly 20 minutes after Query got off the phone with Zoe, stopping very near to where Zoe had driven her abductor’s car behind the tree line. Making some educated guesses about probable locations for any Janus-owned safe-houses out here, Query did some quick calculations about when the car with Zoe might have been expected to arrive at any of those areas, figured their comrades would wait until they were 10 or 15 minutes late to panic, factored in required travel times for those other bad guys to show up here from all the possible locations, and had the sites for Janus’ place in the woods narrowed down to three prime leads.

All while he used the scope on his rifle to size up the three men who were now getting out the car. One of them had a device in hand—probably some kind of receiver/locator—and was likely getting a read on just how far away their missing car was and in which direction it lay. All of them had flashlights; the two guys with Mr. Receiver—as Query had mentally designated the lead guy—had Uzis in hand as well.

If Mad Dash and Zoe were following instructions, they wouldn’t be anywhere near the car and its two corpses right now—wouldn’t be in any spot where the three new arrivals would be scanning the trees with their flashlights.

Hopefully, they’ll also be behind some cover, since Mr. Receiver has clearly figured out where the car is and is now pulling out night vision goggles to look for threats, Query thought. He probably doesn’t really expect any police presence here, or else the car they were seeking wouldn’t be out of sight. But he might be expecting a trap of some other sort. As well he should.

Mr. Receiver even took a long, slow look at the other side of the road, where Query had found a tiny hillock to give himself just a bit of high ground. Query didn’t flinch; the modified portable hunter’s blind he had set up in front of himself would block his heat signature and look like a rock or bush to the night-vision goggles. The barrel of his rifle like some branch.

The man was very thorough in taking stock of his surroundings; his companions were very vigilant in watching his back.

And Query’s trigger finger was feeling quite itchy.

But it was too soon. He trusted his instincts and waited for what he expected—for what he would have done in their place.

And so it was that a second new car arrived on the scene some five minutes after the first one, pulling off to the side a bit farther up the road. For a moment, Query considered waiting some more for a third car, but that was just getting paranoid. So he simply waited until the new quartet of men started walking toward the trio, pulling night vision goggles on as they did.

Odds are that the first team will be going down to check out the car and team two is here to give them some additional protection.

About 10 meters from the trio, the quartet’s tight formation began to fragment just the slightest amount as one man slowed a little, and Query knew that was the point one of them would stop, as the other three would continue on and each stop in turn so they could fan out for the best coverage and ability to kill anyone coming at them from the woods. The two armed men from the original trio were already keeping watch on the road from near the edge of the trees.

Since Query knew the most dangerous threats were getting into position, he decided there was no time like the present to prevent them from getting organized.

While the newest arrivals were still clustered relatively closely to one another, he said into his headset, very softly, “Dash, in 10 seconds the first three guys are yours—take them alive,” and then fired off five shots in rapid succession at the group of newcomers.

The first bullet entered the skull of the man who had just stopped walking. The second bullet went through the throat of the man nearest him, who likely would have been the next to stop in a few more meters. Figuring the time for piling up corpses had come to an end, the fourth and fifth bullets took the third man’s ability to shoot and to run with a bullet in his gun arm and another in one thigh.

Naturally, Query thought, the fourth guy would be alert enough and agile enough to take cover.

Query set down his rifle, picked up a grenade launcher not much larger than the Uzis that Janus’ men were carrying, and said into his headset, “Wait, Dash. Close your eyes until you hear two booms, then hit them.”

Query fired two flashbang grenades just past the roof of the original trio’s car, where his quarry had taken cover, one near the front of the car and the other near the trunk. A loud “whump” and another a second or two later accompanied two bursts of bright light and then Query was bounding down the hillock and toward the road.

He wasn’t trying to beat Dash—no sense in trying that anyway and there was a bit of cleanup work yet. Once he had sprinted across the road, he walked to the man he had shot in the arm and thigh and pepper-sprayed him in the eyes and mouth before quickly binding his hands to his ankles with nylon ties, then continued around the front of the trio’s car, confirmed that his target there was stunned insensate, and quickly bound him as well. He did his best to focus on the task at hand and not react to the sounds of shouting and running so close to him; did his best to be as quick as he could without rushing. Then when he was done, squatting behind his place of cover, he closed his eyes and let his ears sort thing out.

Feet running through the dirt, twigs and rocks—faster than a normal person’s. Mad Dash was still moving. Voices calling out to each other and swearing—only two, though, so Dash had likely taken one man out. Shots fired, but none of them in the direction where Query was huddled against the car, so the remaining pair was clearly too focused on Dash to think about or deal with their other threat: Query.

Query opened his eyes and stood, taking out a tangler. He was just in time to see Mad Dash do a furious high-speed zig-zag through the trees, sliding finally as if trying to beat a ball thrown to home plate and slamming into the legs of one of Janus’ men, who went down about as hard as one might expect when being hit at about 35 or 40 miles per hour.

I know Dash’s unitard is padded and/or lightly armored in places like the thighs and ass, but that costume’s likely going to be a goner and Dash is going to be sporting some rather bloody scrapes, Query thought.

The last man, seeing his comrade go down and realizing he was alone now, was already headed for the car and an attempted getaway, but came to a startled halt as he saw Query.

“Evenin’,” Query said, casually throwing the tangler at the man’s legs and smiling as the sticky tendrils burst out and then contracted back on themselves. The man wobbled for several seconds and finally fell over in a heap. Query tossed a small plastic bag of nylon ties to Mad Dash to restrain these last three men and added to the man on the ground at his feet: “You just relax while I make sure those two friends of yours are really dead and decide whether to make all of the rest of you the same way—only much slower.”

* * *

Underworld was finally in a decent frame of mind again—she’d done a quick set of breathing exercises and a few calming yoga poses and was finally able to get back to the work she needed to finish for phase one of her and Janus’ team expansion plans.

It was, therefore, very disheartening to her when a person burst through the door to her office, ran all the way to her desk and jumped over it, pushing by her legs and then crawling underneath it.

Underworld looked down to see a completely tattooed face staring up from between her legs, and resisted the urge to make any number of snide and risqué comments to the woman huddled underneath her large maple desk and only inches from her lap. She was less able, however, to control the flood of irrationally joyous feelings over the fact that Crazy Jane was near her, though she was pretty sure she managed to keep those feelings from showing on her face.

Crazy Jane’s eyes were wide and earnest as she looked up at Underworld. “If Janus comes looking for me, I’m not here. Please don’t tell him. Please say you don’t know where I am.”

Keeping her eyes fixed at a point she could see both her doorway and Jane in her peripheral vision, Underworld said quietly, “He’ll know if I’m lying. He always knows.”

“Not always,” Crazy Jane. “Not when he’s enraged. It doesn’t work when he’s really mad. That’s when he can’t do that and that’s also when he can do other things. That’s why I need to hide. He’s furious.”

“You do something naughty?”

“No, but Query did,” Crazy Jane answered. “At least I think it’s Query. We’ve lost contact with the team sent out to find out what happened to the car Zoe was in.”

“I don’t think you have to worry, Jane,” Underworld said soothingly. “If you got out of Janus’ way, he’ll likely find some staff member to take it out on. Pretty unlikely he’ll come to my floor looking for trouble, much less looking for you.”

“Thank you, Undie,” Crazy Jane said, and Underworld almost teared up at the sincerity in the younger woman’s voice. “Sometimes, we girls have to stick together, right?”

Underworld simply nodded.

“Can I stay here a while, just in case?”

Underworld nodded again.

“You know, while I’m down here I could give you a foot rub. I’m really goooooood.”

“Oh, what the hell,” Underworld said after a few moments of consideration. “Why not? Girls sticking together, right?”

This time is was Crazy Jane’s turn to nod. And to smile as well.

As Underworld settled in to get her admittedly aching feet pampered a little, she smiled, and not just at the wonderful feeling of having knots and kinks worked out of her toes and soles. She smiled as well as getting some unexpected intelligence about Janus.

I’ve long suspected his ability to tell when a person lies was gender-specific, since he only ever stresses to women that he can tell when they’re not speaking the truth, she thought, but I never realized it was tied to his mood, too. And Jane’s reference to “other things” makes me think perhaps Janus has two sets of powers: one for when he’s calm or relatively so, and one for when he’s not. Makes sense when you consider he named himself after a two-faced god.

Suddenly, being Crazy Jane’s friend, willingly or not, didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

* * *

Two corpses had been added to the pair already in the car with the ruined trunk. The five surviving members of Janus’ team were well past the tree line now and all of them bound and gagged. The two other cars were now parked near each other by the side of the road and a little closer to the tree line.

Query walked back toward Mad Dash and Zoe from those cars, after having left Mad Dash’s backpack on the trunk of one of them and a few scattered granola bars on the hood of the other, along with a jacket and a pair of shoes and socks from one of the dead men

“Why did you do that?” Zoe asked.

“To make it look like they pulled over to do a little wandering and hanging out, instead of looking like they need help. Less likely that a state trooper will check things out if a cruiser happens down the road, and regular drivers will be even less likely to stop and look at things,” Query answered, looking over each man in captivity as if assessing and comparing each one, and then setting down a small tool case he had brought back with him.

“What now?” Zoe asked, fiddling with her bright orange disposable lighter nervously.

“You and Dash will go to my van parked a couple hundred yards down the road and head to a safe-house I have near Fishmonger’s Wharf. Dash knows where it is. You can clean up and you should be able to find some clothes that’ll fit you, Zoe. Have a decent meal, too, if your stomach can handle it. Watch some DVDs or listen to some music. Get some sleep. Dash’ll keep you company there until I’m finished. If I’m not there by dawn, chances are I’m dead and Dash will know who to call to get your situation as sorted out as possible.”

“What about them?” Zoe asked, nodding toward the captive men.

“Don’t worry about them. I have that covered.”

Zoe looked at the case at his feet, and then stared down his concealed eyes behind the black mask for several seconds. She walked up to him, pointed to the red question mark on the mask over his mouth—her finger just inches from it—and said, “Your name is Query; I just asked a question.”

“I ask questions; I rarely like answering them,” Query said coldly.

“You’ll answer mine,” she said, nervous at his tone but reminding herself it was probably bluster to get her to leave—and reminding herself that even if she was wrong, she was hardly powerless. “What are you going to do with them?”

Query sighed behind his mask, and Zoe imagined that his eyes were probably rolling behind it as well. “Zoe, I’m going to ask these fine gentlemen where their little hideout in the woods is. If they don’t answer me, I’ve going to demonstrate how badly I can hurt them with easily accessible items here in nature, and then tell them about the tools in my case here that are more professional-grade. If they don’t answer me even then, I’ll begin using those tools on them.”

Zoe shuddered. “You’re going to torture them.”

“Only if they make me.”

“You mean only if it’s the most convenient route for you.”

“Zoe, I don’t want to debate situational ethics with you right now,” Query groused. “These men kidnapped you. They were willing to kill you.”

“Noooo,” Zoe said. “Two of the dead men in that car over there, and I guess some guys in another car from what Dash has told me, were the ones who kidnapped me, and only one of them maybe was trying to kill me. They’re dead. I fucking lost my composure and killed them. Two other men are dead at your hands. These men came to check on their buddies. I don’t know what they would have done if you hadn’t attacked them.”

“Surely you not suggesting I shouldn’t have…”

“Of course not. You shot first. Wise move. They work for Janus. They were armed. But goddamn it I’m not going to let you torture them just to find out where they came from or for anything someone else did to me. I mean, really, do you expect to find Janus at their hidey-hole? Do you expect him to come here to the woods and throw down with you? I’ve been dealing with Underworld all this time and nothing suggests to me that they’ve suddenly gone lax on their security. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts these guys probably don’t even know where Janus is or the other guys who tried to nab me before at graduation probably would have known.”

“I think we need to be sure, Zoe. And if I go to their place here in the woods, I can look for clues that will help me find Janus later,” Query said. “I need you to go now.”

“How would you even know if they were telling the truth if they did give up a location to you, huh?” she pressed. “People will say lots of things under torture or to buy time.”

“Because,” he responded, raising his voice for the benefit of his captives and turning his head slightly in their direction, “I’ve already figured out from their response time and what I know about this area where the three most likely locales are. If they give me any other location that isn’t in one of those areas, I’ll hurt them more.”

“No.”

“Zoe, this isn’t your operation. This isn’t about you.”

“Yes it goddamn is!” she shouted. “I was the one kidnapped. I’m the one who’s got bits of people all over her. People have been firing bullets all around me and one zipped right past the top of my head. You took on my case so I’m your fucking employer—kinda. It’s all about me and I say you aren’t going to do this.”

“It’s more about me than you know, Zoe. In any case, I need this info…”

“…fine!” she interrupted him, and stalked toward the bound men, morphing as she did to take on a slightly more attention-getting and menacing look—though Query noted her locs, while clearly hardened and sharp, were no longer animated as when she was panicked in the trunk. “Here’s how it’s gonna be, boys. One of you will tell me right now where your little place in the woods is. Then after you’re handed over to the police or whatever—somebody less likely to torture you, in any case—you can go back to clamming up and not saying any damn thing about Janus and if he asks you can all tell him you don’t know how Query knew how to find your hideout. He can just assume Query found your place on his own with his super-intuition. Totally plausible, since he’s apparently already narrowed it down. But he’s really cranky, as you can see, and if you make him search too long, or waste too much time talking to you about it, he’s going to go all Spanish Inquisition on you. Whoever wants to tell me can just nod and I’ll pull off your gag.”

No one nodded.

“Unless Janus is there at your place in the woods, this is a win-win for everyone to tell me, guys,” Zoe said more firmly, flexing her fingers with their sharp, glistening burgundy nails. “You stay quiet about it, then Query is going to start thinking Janus is there, and if that happens I think you’re all going to be probed in a lot of places humans weren’t meant to be probed with things that weren’t meant to go there. Your choice.”

Ten minutes later, Zoe was in the passenger seat of Query’s van on her way to a date with a hot shower, with Mad Dash humming some tune wildly out-of-key on the driver’s side, while Query was taking a ride in one of Janus’ cars to a place in the woods.

Zoe closed her eyes and smiled a little.

I win.

[ – To view the next chapter, click here – ]

The Gathering Storm, Part 24

[ – To view a list of all current chapters, click here – ]

Stale stifling blackness. Spinning bouncing. Smells—Greasy sweaty green. Sensations—rough, warm, damp, gritty.

No room to move; can’t focus. What? Where? How?

Drifting. Panic. Sleepy. Weak. Angry. Terrified.

I will no go…I will not…gone…go…quietly.

* * *

“Dash! Please tell me you’re not in the middle of something you can’t get out of.”

“Query? Yeah, I’m cool. Just at my place deciding whether to patrol or watch a chickety-chick-rom-com-flick on streaming.”

“Zoe’s been nabbed,” Query said over the phone. “She’s on the move with her captors and I need an intercept while I’m driving like a bat out of hell to get there.”

“How do you know where she is if you’re not…”

“Quiet, Dash! Listen. Time’s short,” Query said, thinking about how the private investigator had needed to drop out of the pursuit of the kidnappers mere minutes ago when they pulled over in a dark area to put an apparently drugged and now also handcuffed Zoe into the trunk out of sight of any passing motorists or cops. The last thing the PI had seen in his rearview mirror were the cars getting back on the road, the one with Zoe still heading toward Grace Memorial Highway, apparently, while the other car headed back into the city proper.

“I had someone following her,” Query said. “He lost them but I reacquired her with one of my drones. Pidwidgeon is following now and keeping tabs. But they’re headed into the woods using Grace Memorial; I may lose them if they go anyplace thickly forested.”

“Grace?” Mad Dash said. “Q-man, I’ve got a few pre-packed school backpacks for emergency crapiolus like this but that’s a long way over a lot of different species of terrain. I’ll have to pack a hiker’s backpack with one or two extra pairs of boots and tons of snacks to refuel on the way.”

“No!” Query snapped. “No time for that, and a backpack that big’ll throw you off balance. Last thing I need is you breaking an ankle. Throw one extra pair of boots in a small pack and toss as many energy bars and water as you can in it. Do you have cash around? A decent amount?”

“Yeah, surely whirly I do. I guess maybe 60 or 70 bucks?”

“Fine. Grab it all. Take Parliament Avenue then hit Madsen and then Mozart. Cut straight through Whitley Park near where the bike trails start and then pick up Route 136 on the other side of the park and head toward Grace. That route will take you by plenty of fast-food joints. Hit the drive-through lanes as you need to fuel up; ignore the lure of Happy Meal toys. Make sure you have your headset on before you leave, set to our channel; remember to turn it on. I’ll keep in touch and guide you when you’re close enough. Got it?”

“Gotcha. Getcha. You betcha!”

“Go! Run like the fucking wind, Dash.”

* * *

A large hand engulfed Cole’s right shoulder, settling there with surprising gentleness. Then the couch squealed a bit in protest as PrinSass settled her bulk down next to Cole.

“What’s gotcha down, bruh?” she asked quietly, the softness of concern weaving oddly amidst her more gravelly bass tones. It always struck Cole as odd how unfeminine PinSass’ voice was aesthetically yet how obviously female it remained nonetheless.

“Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s ever gonna change, PrinSass,” Cole said. “I’ll be the outsider that the top guys can’t stand as long as I’m here, and these fucking migraines and clouded vision will just get worse from the stress probably and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore anyway.”

“Muddling through, Quantum,” she said to Cole. “Gettin’ by. Toughing it out. That’s what it’s about, bruh. Just cuz I weigh a few hundred pounds and can squash almost anyone by sittin’ on ’em or punchin’ ’em, it doesn’t make it easy. I’m still a bitch. Cunt. Twat. Chick. Girl. To Desperado and all them. Whatever. You ain’t noticed that yet?”

“Of course I have…sorry…I know it’s not easy for you ladies and for a lot of other folks in the Corps. I know I’m having a pity party,” Cole acknowledged, grimacing and now flushing with embarrassment. “But is it worth going through?”

PrinSass made a rumbling chuckle. “For me, for you or for everyone else?”

“I was thinking about me, but…whatever you can provide your wisdom on, oh mighty oracle,” Cole joked.

PrinSass smiled. “I like beating folks up and not having to feel bad about it, so…yeah, it works for me, Quantum. Fightin’ crime’s good for my complexion, too. Keeps me a cute big gal. Is it worth it for you? I dunno…is it?”

Cole hesitated, frowned and finally sighed. “Doing what I do is worth it. I’m just not sure it’s worth doing with Desperado calling my shots. But what else is there for a noob like me? I’ve got a name—Quantum. I almost have a costume. But that’s about all I have at the moment.”

“It’s a start,” PrinSass said, slapping him hard on the thigh and making him wince. “Now let’s go grab a couple cups of really bad coffee while everyone else cleans up this time and we wait for Sweet Talker.”

* * *

Query’s altered brain functions since he became transhuman were well-suited for multi-tasking; however, trying to make phone calls while driving fast and trying to avoid police cruisers that might pull him over—all while checking on the video and GPS info from his drone—was straining that ability.

Not to mention the fact that the drone was moving so much faster than it should be while on autopilot that he had to make sure to adjust its course now and again with the tablet computer in the passenger-side seat of his car, lest Pidwidgeon crash and make this entire exercise a moot point. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to reacquire Zoe with another drone in time if that happened, though he’d sent out a summons for Bubo, the nearest of the other four drones out tonight—to join Pidwidgeon in the pursuit—just in case.

No telling how much longer that will be, since I don’t have any more attention to spare to track Bubo.

At full tilt, even with a few stops for food, Mad Dash would almost certainly beat Query to Zoe, if he was able to get to her in time at all. Dash’s apartment was closer already and he had the advantage of being able to cut through alleys and across parks and such, unlike Query’s van.

Would have been better for speed of travel had I been driving the Mercedes or Porsche, but it’s a little hard to stash much in the way of costumes and gear in a four-door sedan, he mused bitterly, and damn near impossible in a sports car.

There was a tiny flash of movement on the display of the iPad Quinto in the passenger seat. Something narrow and long. If not for his enhanced senses, it might not have caught his attention at all. Then another. And another.

Trusting his instincts that he needed intelligence more than he needed to try to keep up with Mad Dash’s arrival time at the narrow old highway heading into the woods, Query pulled the van over to the side of the road suddenly and snatched up the tablet computer.

He saw the trunk bulge slightly in one place, the dent produced from inside. By Zoe, no doubt.

Then another long, thin something punching through the metal. Four holes now.

Those looked like damned red, black and yellow snakes, Query considered. Or eels or tentacles. Or…Zoe’s locs. Her hair.

Another dent, and now there was a trio of razor-sharp, frenzied locs punching through. Then a flurry of them. Holes and more holes, and some of them tearing the metal a little.

Despite all the ruckus, the driver and his partner in the car didn’t seem to notice anything over the noise of an already bumpy road and their conversation and whatever music might be playing on their radio or disc player.

I want to get to her; I want to be close, especially if it might lead me to Janus or end up with Janus arriving on scene—unlikely though that would be, Query thought as he watched the video feed from Pidwidgeon. But in all honesty, it looks like at this moment, there isn’t a thing I can do about whatever’s about to go down, except watch, analyze, let Dash know and then get there as soon as I can.

The trunk was quickly becoming a ruin of holes and rips, and then Query saw a hand punch through, one cuff of a pair of handcuffs attached to it, but only a few links of chain dangling there. Five nails of that hand dug into the exterior surface of the car in which Zoe was trapped. Then her other hand, just as lethally clawed and bearing the other half of the broken handcuffs, tore a huge gash through the top of the trunk.

Her movements angry and panicked, she started flailing, finally ripping a hole large enough to let her rise to a squatting position, her head now level with the top of the sedan that had so recently been her prison. Her body was criss-crossed with various cuts and scratches, Query could tell—Pidwidgeon and the other drones offered fantastic video resolution.

But she’s not nearly as hurt as she should be considering all the jagged edges of metal she just burst through, Query noted mentally.

Her head swiveled slowly, taking stock of things. She still seemed a little confused, but he swore he saw something like realization now, and cold fury along with it.

They probably drugged her, but she’s not very much out of it anymore; perhaps she’s a Regenerator on top of her Acro and Morph powers.

Her locs of varied colors were swirling and writhing like the serpents on Medusa’s scalp, and then she looked through the rear window, toward the driver and passenger.

Query couldn’t see Zoe’s face after she turned to behold her captors, but he could imagine any number of expressions that might be on it, and few of them struck him as something either man in the car would want to see.

But the passenger had clearly registered the flurry of motion and the bulk of a human body now half out of the trunk, and turned to get a better view of what his peripheral vision had picked up. He saw that look that Query couldn’t, and Query was pretty sure it scared him. The driver himself jerked, probably in response to a warning from his partner—though perhaps he’d seen something in the rearview mirror as well.

Too late. Way too late, Query realized.

The only question remaining unanswered for him right now was whether it was too late just for Janus’ minions or for Zoe as well.

She surged out of the trunk and onto the roof, her sharp and apparently very hardened nails giving her firm purchase, aided by the uncanny balance and agility afforded to her by her Acro powers. But the hair and nails weren’t the only change from her Morph powers—her skin was glossier now, and seemed smoother and tighter against her muscles. Perhaps a tad darker as well. Her clothes were shredded from the metal of the trunk ripping at them, but her skin was mostly unmarred.

She managed to get above the driver and passenger seats and ripped a good-sized hole above the driver’s side with one hand. But before she could make any more progress, the driver hit the brakes as hard as he could without swerving completely out of control.

Query’s belly cramped and twisted at the thought of Zoe’s fate now, as physics won out over her firm grip and sure reflexes, and she flew forward past the front windshield, taking a small piece of the roof of the car with her.

One of her feet managed to make contact with the hood—intentionally, it seemed—and her leg thrust her upward even as she flew forward. Then to Query’s amazement, she flipped once in the air, came down hard on the road on both feet, and then flipped several more times, including a one-handed flip that sent her nearly straight up into the air.

She was awkward and almost lost her balance several times. In competition, such sloppy form would have lost her plenty of points with the judges. But considering she’d just been flung from a rapidly braking car, the fact she hadn’t slid across the asphalt earning a body-wide case of road rash was amazing to Query.

When she competed in college gymnastics, she was holding back as least three-quarters of what she was capable of doing, he estimated.

When she came to a stop some dozen meters from the car, she was in a crouch. The driver of the car was disoriented at first and unsure what was going on, but as soon as he saw her, he put the car back in gear. By then, though, Zoe was already on the move. By the time he was accelerating at all, she was already on top of the car again, and yanking his head up toward the hole she had made in the roof. He was strong, but it was clear Zoe was at least a low-level Brute on top of everything else, and she wrestled his head through the hole. No longer able to press the accelerator or steer, the car slowed and drifted toward the shoulder, as the passenger yanked the emergency brake.

Looking into the driver’s eyes for a split-second, and then glancing down to see one hand reaching for something under his left armpit, Zoe started yanking his head back-and-forth, slashing his neck against the sharp edges of the hole in the roof of the car, even as the claws with which she gripped his scalp dug furrows into his skull.

Satisfied that he was no longer a threat, Zoe let him fall back into his seat and leapt back to the road as the passenger scrambled out of the car and pulled a gun.

Query’s renewed concern for Zoe was tempered slightly by the knowledge that if this man did kill her, Janus would do something far worse to him than simple death for cheating the crimelord of his prize.

Zoe hesitated only a moment, pulled between the desire to fight and the urge to flee to cover, and then she lunged. The man got off a shot, but it went wide.

Zoe’s attack did not, however.

She slashed him with one set of nails, and then began to circle him in something that seemed half a dance and half an acrobatic spectacle. She whipped her head back and forth as she spun and flipped around him and over him. Her locs, clearly razor-sharp and harder than they had any right to be since she had employed her Morph powers, laid into him like a scourge in the hands of a Roman centurion. In moments, half his face and one arm were thoroughly flayed, and the rest of his upper torso didn’t look much better.

His gun was on the ground now, and Zoe stopped her deadly dance.

She looked at her victim almost curiously, and Query thought he detected a hint of shock and queasiness in her eyes now, dulling the rage. He stood for several moments, though dead or nearly so, before gravity introduced his corpse to the ground.

Query made a call to Mad Dash, hoping the man had remembered to turn on his headset.

“Dash?”

“En route, toot-e-toot-toot, Query. Moving as fast as I can,” Dash said, sounding winded but chipper.

“It’s not that, Dash. I just want you to know this isn’t as much a rescue operation as I had expected. It looks like more of a clean-up.”

“Oh, no! She’s dead?”

“No. No, she isn’t. Dash, when you get close to her position—and believe me, I’ll give you plenty of warning—go in as calmly and as non-threatening as you can. If you go in hot and she thinks you’re an enemy, I might be burying you in the woods along with the two guys she just laid waste to.”

* * *

“Thank you for coming, Underworld, though I had told you to be here 20 minutes ago,” Janus groused. He was wearing a bulky metal helmet with two faces on it today, but more science fiction or fantasy-like, Underworld noted, compared to the one he often wore with the ancient Greek-style dual faces of the god Janus gazing into the future and the past. The mask he was wearing now suggested something more like paranoid conjoined twin warlords looking out for attacks. Also, it seemed familiar, as if she had seen it in some movie trailer or poster some years back.

It was a Vin Diesel movie, now that I think of it, she remembered. What I wouldn’t do to have a nice-looking piece of man like that right now here beating Janus’ face in while I watch.

“Janus, you don’t tell me to do anything,” she retorted sourly. “And you should feel lucky I only showed up late and not with an Uzi or a pair of Rottweilers trained to attack anything that smells like your cologne or your sweat.”

“Are you still on about the Crazy Jane situation?” he asked. “You needed a girlfriend to hang out with; you should be happy. I can’t believe you’re still imagining the most vile ways of killing me because you think I’m responsible.”

“My choice of examples should indicate I’ve downgraded from the ‘most vile’ notions,” she half-growled. “Some of my earlier ideas involved blowtorches, red ants, sulfuric acid and things along those lines. You’ve got too many fucking sins stacked up with me, starting with threatening my family so no, it’s not just about having a Crazy Jane addiction. That’s just the final straw.”

Janus leaned back, the oversized helmet somehow both completely out of sync with the lean and sleek silver-gray suit he was wearing today and yet somehow going so well with it. “You need to lighten up, Underworld. I treat you with far more kindness and respect than 90 percent of the people I deal with. Relax. Enjoy our promising life of crime together. Get to know Jane. Stop projecting your anger outward and redirect your energies.”

Those words from any other mouth might have been reasonable, thought Underworld, but she was certain she detected a taunting note in them. He doesn’t fuck me over as badly as most people, but he enjoys pulling my strings like a puppeteer far too much. It’s intolerable.

“What do you want, Janus? Why did you call me? If you want me to stop hating you so much, you need to let me have some space from you when we aren’t interviewing or orienting new recruits and prospects.”

“Amazingly enough, I actually did call you into my office because of staffing issues—as well as to kill time while I wait for word on Zoe’s delivery to our wooded enclave,” Janus said. “Excellent work, by the way, on the snatching of Zoe. Stealing her right out of a party and no one at it any the wiser. I’d almost think you were showing off.”

For once, Underworld noted, there was hardly a hint of jeering or needling in his words; instead, he seemed pleasantly amused and legitimately complimentary. That threw Underworld off her game a bit. She wanted—needed—to hold tight to her hatred and anger. This was not a man she could trust; she could not allow herself to think of him as anything more than an uneasy ally.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly. “I knew Breathtaker would be perfect for that job.”

“I hope you’re not going to petition for him to be on our A-list. He did well, but I’m not sold on him.”

“Not a chance,” Underworld answered, putting the slightest hint of offense in her cadence. “He’s B-list. Second tier. I don’t think he’s discreet enough and I wouldn’t trust him to be any closer to the center of our circle than he absolutely needs to be. But he’s certainly not on the C-list like Hellfire and your other cannon-fodder recruits.”

“Agreed. But it’s not really Breathtaker I wanted to talk about. It’s Odium.”

Underworld winced and made a small groaning sound. “I don’t deny that his powers would be useful—and his non-transhuman skill sets,” she said, “but he disturbs me. There’s something terribly wrong with him.”

“There is something terribly wrong with most of us, my dear,” Janus pointed out. “You are regularly hanging out with a woman who is guilty of several very grisly and sadistic murders and who revels in using baseline humans as material in the pursuit of her creation of artistic works of insanity.”

“You’re responsible for making her that way, Janus…”

“…you’ve just made my point,” he cut in. “There’s something terribly wrong with me—by society’s standards, at least—and I’m the kingpin of all this and you’re my partner.”

“Point is,” Underworld said sternly to retrieve her line of argument, “that I was never comfortable with Crazy Jane being around, either—at least not out of that giant bird cage you had made for her—until you directed her to use her powers on me and I was biochemically coerced into being her friend.”

“You know, I’ve never admitted to doing that; it’s all speculation on your part,” Janus noted. “Did you ever consider that Jane just liked you? She has odd ways of showing affection at times.”

“Stop trying to deflect me and stop pretending you didn’t order or at least strongly suggest she ensnare me.”

“Ooooh, ‘ensnare.’ I do like that word choice. Has a very sensually kinky feel to it. You continue to prove day by day that you were a much better choice than my backup plan of Madamnation as a partner.”

“Would you please shut the fuck up!” she snapped. “Point is that we need to be careful about bringing people onto the A-list—or the B-list, for that matter—who might be a little too crazy. We already have you in one of the top two seats, we then we have Jane and Tooth Fairy. Too much crazy already for my tastes, no matter how obsessive and effective a control freak you are. Eventually, you will have a herd of insane, murderous cats you can’t herd anymore.”

“In fairness, Tooth Fairy is in the A-list in only a peripheral sense,” Janus countered. “She’s going to be a key player, but she’s not a team player. She’s primo hired help.”

“Odium isn’t exactly striking me as a team player either, Janus.”

“Not exactly, no. But he wants to be, and I can use that to rein him in,” Janus said.

Underworld paused and considered. She’d already picked up on Odium’s self-hatred, but she hadn’t considered the deeper source from which that might spring. “You think deep down he wants a family, don’t you? Someplace to belong.”

“Yes, I do,” Janus stated. “And I don’t think; I’m sure of it. And Crazy Jane might be just the sister-figure he needs, with Papa Janus and Mama Underworld.”

“God, Janus, don’t use Jane to snare everyone and have some hold on them,” Underworld warned. “The more people she juggles and who want her attention, the more you set up risks for conflict and competition. Also, it goes both ways. She gets attached, even if it often is a creepy kind of attachment. What if she has her hooks in Odium and you have to sacrifice him later?”

“Worry not, my dear,” Janus said. “I’ve considered that, too. He’s not someone I’d just toss away on a whim, and we won’t have to worry about romantic entanglements—Jane would be going for a sisterly approach as she sets her hooks. And Odium is the only person on whom I plan to have her use that particular power—and tell no one on any of our teams about that power, Underworld—at least the only person for a very long time.”

“Aside from myself,” Underworld noted with a sarcastic edge.

“I continue to tell you that I am not taking credit for Jane and you. Perhaps she has deeply buried bi-curious tendencies or simply feels isolated by her demeanor and needed a girlfriend to hang out with as much as you did, for different reasons,” he responded reasonably. Then his tone shifted suddenly to the taunting mode that so infuriated her as he said, “Now, go toddle off and do some girl things together while I wait for word on Zoe.”

A sharp, hot ribbon of rage flashed into Underworld’s brain, as if a rocket of hate had launched from the base of her spine.

After all that, trying to mollify me, and then at the end he throws it back in my face again to let me know he did it without openly admitting it. Oh, I’m back to wanting you dead, Janus. Thank you for that. I don’t know how to pull it off yet, but I’ve been involved in long cons before—this is just a more lethal variant of that. I’ll find a way to end you and still keep Jane to myself without her ever knowing it was me—alone with her to console her and move beyond you.

* * *

She’d just killed two men. And she’d thrown up. And she was half-naked, her clothes largely a mass of tatters on her now.

One of the last things Zoe Dawson really expected or wanted was a phone call.

As she heard her phone ring and felt it buzz in her pocket, she began to reach for it, and then realized her hand was covered in blood. She started to wipe in on her pants, then thought better of it—as well as almost being seized by a desire to retch at the idea—and then she wiped it off on the car’s interior upholstery. By that time, the ringer had stopped and voicemail had picked up. Then the phone rang again, and she yanked it out of her pocket.

“Hello?!” she blurted in a voice too loud and shrill with anxiety and panic for her own comfort.

“Thank God your phone’s still on you and not damaged. This is Query. I need you to toss those guys in the car and get that car off the road and mostly out of sight now.”

“How do you know…”

“Zoe, do it now. We do not want police entanglement or witnesses. I’ve made calls to slow any traffic heading up the road from the city, but someone might come the other way. Get those men in the car and drive it off the shoulder and just past the tree line. There’s a small rocky rise you should be able to use to keep anyone from seeing the car. Now, Zoe, before someone sees that carnage!”

To her credit, Query thought, she was good under pressure, and got one man into the car quickly. The other one, closer to the shoulder of the road, she simply rolled down toward a ditch-like depression, which would put him out of sight from the narrow highway. Then she started driving the car, realized the hand-brake was still on, disengaged it and got the car off the road.

Then she put the phone to her ear, and asked, firmly and quietly, “How do you know what’s going on?”

“I had someone watching you tonight,” Query answered. “He lost you after they nabbed you, but I have some Air Force-issue military drones in my possession and one of them, Pidwidgeon, has been watching you since shortly after that happened.”

“Pidwidgeon…” she said dubiously. “You read the Harry Potter books?”

“I have eclectic tastes and sometimes a lot of time on my hands,” he answered in a dead-pan. “How are you doing?”

She looked down at her bloody clothes and stained hands, and said, “I think I may throw up again soon, if that’s all right.”

“By all means, Zoe. By all means. Look, I don’t want to worry you, but this isn’t over yet. I need you to stay put and stay alert and stay calm,” Query told her. “I have a friend, Mad Dash—you may know about…”

“…runs really fast. Acts a little loopy. But pretty much a straight-ahead good guy,” she said.

“Yeah. He’s on his way. Please don’t confuse him for an enemy combatant when he arrives and kill him or anything. He’s one of the few real friends I have.”

“OK.”

“You’re doing fantastic, Zoe. Really.”

Then she doubled over, threw up violently, and when the dry heaves finally stopped, she placed the phone against her cheek again, a thin trail of tears on either side of her face. “How about now?” she said in a whimper.

“Still doing great. You’re tough as nails, Zoe. I know that. But killing someone isn’t pleasant. It messes with you. That’s natural. It means you’re a decent human. You’re doing great.”

“Thanks. I want to go home. Very badly,” she said in a quiet voice.

“I think we need to find someplace safer than home, Zoe, but I promise I’ll keep you safe. We’re almost done with the worst part of things,” Query said. “Just wait for Dash. Zoe?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever watch Pulp Fiction?”

“At least eight times in my life so far, I guess,” she said, perplexed but feeling a sense of calm return. Just small talk now. She’d killed two men, but now it was small talk. Normal life in the midst of madness.

“Well, Zoe, you and Dash sit tight,” he said. “I’m sending in The Wolf.”

“Shit, nigger, that’s all you had to say,” Zoe said, laughing and crying a little at the same time, delivering the movie line in a half-anxious, wavering manner, but not too far off Samuel L. Jackson’s original cadences. “Wait, though,” she said. “If Mad Dash isn’t The Wolf, who is?”

“That would be me, Zoe,” Query said. “Big Bad Wolf, in fact. I’m going to blow down someone’s house. At least one of them. It might only end up being the straw house, but I’m gonna fucking blow it down.”

[ – To view the next chapter, click here – ]

The Gathering Storm, Part 22

[ – To view a list of all current chapters, click here – ]

Cole looked out across the devastation of the main gathering area at the Guardian Corps’ central headquarters. In some senses, it didn’t look that much different than normal. It wasn’t as if the Corps had deep pockets. They survived mostly by donations and secondarily by whatever bits of money they might surreptitiously lift from some of the gang-bangers that tended to be their main prey as they patrolled the streets.

As such, their main headquarters was a smallish warehouse that a local company had found little interest in using to its full effectiveness and less interest in bringing up to code so that the city would let them, deciding that donating it to a crime-fighting cause was the easiest path. The furniture and computers were likewise donated—old and often not in the best condition. The members of the Corps themselves were often young men with at least a slight propensity for slovenly habits. As such, the place was usually a slightly dusty mess.

But this was something else entirely, and while it might not look tremendously more messy than usual, the substantive damage was more serious. Computers cracked open. Several chairs and one big table reduced to splinters. They were used to litter and clutter, but not from things that used to be useful and now were destroyed. Also, there were the numerous bullet holes in the drywall of haphazardly erected rooms that had been built to give certain members of the Corps a sense of having their own workspaces—something more than cubicles but less than offices. Now those walls were, in many cases, leaning and probably ready to fall over.

The various patches of blood on the concrete floor were also new. They’d been mostly mopped up, but while no longer thick, sticky and wet, they were still red stains that recalled the battle the night before.

Cole had been off-duty last night, so he’d missed that fight. That made him feel a strange combination of guilt and relief.

After weeks of having their patrols and raids sabotaged, some of their enemies had finally taken the fight directly to the Corps—to the main headquarters that it tried to keep as low-key as possible and a secret to their worst enemies, at least.

All in all, the string of ambushes and now an overt attack suggested that one or more people inside the Guardian Corps was a traitor who was feeding information to the highest bidder.

Or bidders.

The leaders of the Corps, including Desperado, were furiously directing people to clean up and pack things, as they also tried to secure a new location to which they could move soon and try to regain some sense of secrecy and security.

This place wasn’t much, but to Cole, it had become a kind of home. He wasn’t sure it was someplace he wanted to be involved with long-term, like Epitaph was, but it was home.

And now, he would have to move, and wonder if any place they might set down roots for the Corps now would ever be truly safe.

Cole saw Desperado in the distance, and met his eyes, which were hard and cold. The man said something to a few nearby lieutenants that Cole had no hope of hearing, and suddenly four sets of eyes were boring into him. Once again, among the most piercing stares was from one of Desperado’s top guys: Puma. A similar look as the man had used a couple other times recently when Cole was the object of attention and derision by Desperado and his inner circle.

But it was a look of deliberation and consideration, it seemed, and only tinged with hostility, while the other sets of eyes looked at Cole as if he were an unwelcome outsider.

Cole turned away, hung his head, and went to help Sweet Talker and PrinSass clean up some debris. At least the candy-themed, chewing-gum addicted woman and her burly, broad sister-in-crimefighting seemed to like him.

* * *

“So, how do you like the place?” Janus asked the man in front of him, who was clad all in black, from his shoes to his jeans to his shirt to his trench coat—all except for the full-head, red mask that revealed no part of the man’s face at all. “A little tender loving care from our new team, and it will be something to adore, don’t you think? A really sweet spot to enjoy life and have a few laughs.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” the man said grimly, not a trace of amusement in his tone.

“A joke? Why of course not…oh, all right, a little ribbing, I admit,” Janus said, stroking one side of his mask as if smoothing back some unruly locks of hair—it was some Central American themed thing that looked to Underworld like it was from a Day of the Dead celebration, with one side a smiling face and the other hinting at a skull. “I mean, you might actually end up working for me, after all. It would be nice to know if you appreciate my humor.”

“I’ll do my best to pretend I do,” the man said.

“Janus, his name is Odium,” Underworld noted. “I don’t expect much good humor from a man with that kind of name—and reputation.”

The red-masked head swiveled toward her. “Do you have something against what I do?” The voice was heavy with menace, but Underworld didn’t even flinch—only smiled disarmingly.

“While I know she’s more than capable of taking care of herself, I should point out, Odium, that if you use your powers against either one of us, this interview will be cut brutally short.”

“Oh, I’m well aware,” Odium answered. “So, what if I don’t want the job? Now that you’ve let me see where your headquarters is. Especially with the both of you being suspicious of my attitude.”

“Would that be a threat?” Underworld asked mildly.

“Observation,” Odium responded.

“Well, if you’re basing our worth as an organization with which to connect yourself on this location, you’d be underestimating us,” Janus broke in. “Underworld and I, along with core non-transhuman staff like my hackers and analysts, reside on several nicely appointed floors in a very reputable building.”

“And if I decide I want the job, I get to bunk down a lot with a handful of other folks here in Sparsity Land?”

“Janus and I value security, and whatever transhuman team we assemble will be more likely than us to draw tails and such,” Underworld said, “as well as being less able and sometimes less willing to follow strict security protocols. So, none of you will ever know about the central operations. Also, you won’t all be in the same place at the same time, unless for some seriously big shit. We have several small buildings like this one. You’ll get a small support staff and we will be doing substantial redecorating—fear not.”

“Although,” Janus interrupted, “you don’t seem the type who cares much about the finer things in life. Should we just put a cot and small table in your room at each location? Maybe a radio that only gets AM?”

“I find hate for hatred’s sake to be enough for personal satisfaction most days, but that doesn’t mean I want to hang out someplace with concrete floors and fold-out metal chairs and card tables,” Odium said. “I don’t hate myself.”

“Not entirely, anyway,” Underworld said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? You fixing to psychoanalyze me?”

“Making an observation,” she said, putting just enough emphasis on the last word to let him now she was sending his earlier retort right back at him. “This is a job interview. Make no mistake. For a potentially very lucrative line of work. With benefits. I’d be your boss…”

“One of your bosses,” Janus noted.

“Yes, one of your bosses. But since some people seem to have trouble focusing on administrative details with staffing, I’d be the one giving you most of your marching orders and doing regular performance reviews,” she told Odium, trying to get back to ignoring Janus as much as possible. It was the only way she figured she could avoid the temptation to murder him for the whole Crazy Jane situation.

A line of thought that only reminded her she missed Jane a bit and hadn’t seen her in more than a day.

Shit, she thought, feeling both an eagerness to get back to the main building and see her as well as revulsion at the low-level addiction she had to the other woman’s presence. Problem is that the eagerness and desire have steadily come to outweigh the fear, disgust and annoyance, meaning that I’ve all but stopped trying to find ways to slip the snare that is Crazy Jane. But on the bright side, ending my interest in escaping her small hold will give me more time to figure out how to kill Janus without upsetting her.

“Job reviews, too?” Odium sneered, pulling Underworld out of her private thoughts. “Ah, hell, just what I wanted. A 9-to-5 gig.”

“Hours will be longer than that sometimes, shorter at others,” Underworld noted. “But few jobs will offer such moral latitude, including giving you many chances to hurt people and sometimes kill them, will they? Unless you think your prospects are better as a mob enforcer.”

“Don’t knock it,” Odium said. “I’ve made some bucks that way.”

“Yes, and probably been looked at like a freak and treated with about as much affection as a guard dog by a bunch of norms who don’t understand a damn thing about you,” Underworld noted. “And all so that if there’s a family struggle or organizational squabble, you can possibly end up taking a bullet to the back of your skull during a dinner at an Italian or Russian restaurant as part of the staff reorganization plan.”

“I’ll think about it,” Odium said.

“You have the prospectus,” Underworld said. “And now you have four days to get back to us.”

“And every day you wait, our interest in you will wane accordingly,” Janus added.

* * *

The tiny fluttering sensation of his belly rising a hair and then gravity pulling it back down a fraction of a centimeter. A ding. The tiny rumble of a metal door sliding open.

And then he was looking at it.

Ladykiller’s home.

Well, a hallway, anyway, Mad Dash considered. Not all that great of a hallway, either. Wallpaper is kind of bleu cheesy. Table might be nice in a Greek food temple. Flowers in the vase look like they could use some Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.

“You can go in, Dash—I mean, Peter,” Ladykiller said. She was in civilian clothes, as he was, and clearly she was uncomfortable having to think in un-costumed norm terms, though he noted an almost giddy expectation in her eyes. Nervousness, excitement and a desire to please all rolled into one. “Welcome to my home.”

Of course, this is the most intimate thing she’d done with me, he considered of his girlfriend—Ladykiller or Honey Badger in costume and Sarah out of them; they hadn’t graduated to sharing each other’s surnames yet. Letting me into her home. Her secret lair. The most personal thing we’ve shared aside from making out—at least since that time a few weeks back when she showed up at my tussle with that other Speedster and let me see her real face.

Peter realized he was still just standing there, and then chuckled nervously and stepped into the hall and set down the duffle bag that held his costume and various miscellany. Sarah smiled back, a little less nervousness there, and took her finger off the “hold” button for the private elevator to this penthouse condominium, stepping into the hall herself and taking Peter’s left hand in her right. Her palm felt warm and clammy and her fingers were quivering just a little, he realized, and he gave it a small, encouraging squeeze.

“My home,” she repeated. “Let me show you around.”

She gave him the rounds in a haphazard way, sometimes leaving a room only to bring him back to it again within a minute or two to point out something else about it. She seemed most proud of the bathrooms and living room. The kitchen and small bedroom where she slept got the least attention.

Eight rooms in total, with the last one on the tour a combination of office and armory, where she kept her costumes, weapons, a couple computers, some files and other things related to her vigilante work. It was the biggest of all the rooms, and looked as if it had once been an office and a bedroom with the wall knocked down between them. The door to it was heavy and fitted with several locks, as well as an alarm system.

“Nicey icey place,” the man known in costume as Mad Dash said finally. “How do you pay for this, Sarah? I don’t get the depression you work for a living. Are you noodle riche or something?”

“Noodle…? Oh, Nouveau riche? I wish,” she said. “Oh, wait, I guess I kinda am now for the past couple years. This was his condo. The guy who kidnapped me and kept me here for nearly a year raping me when was home—thankfully, that wasn’t very often. No day job since he locked me up here, though; didn’t even go back to being an office hack after I killed him. I spent my days working out for him; now I spend them working out so I can be Ladykiller.”

“He left you alone all day long in here with that war-room back there? I’m guessing it was his at first. You know, before you sent him to sleep with the daisies.”

“See those white lines on the floor on front of the elevator, doors, and windows, Peter? Well, if I got too close to those lines, it triggered a taser locked around my neck. And that would alert him by pager or phone or something. It only took one time to get the message quick that I shouldn’t try to go where I wasn’t allowed.”

“Still…if I were that freakazoidal I think I’d be nervous you’d get my keys and get into that room with the guns and whatnot,” Peter noted.

“There was a key chain thingy his keys were attached to. He told me if I got near it that would set off my collar too. I didn’t have any reason to doubt that was true; never got a chance to test it. He’d drop them on the table there in the hall near the elevator when he got home and getting near that table would set off the collar too. See? White line all around it.”

“So…but…how? The money. I mean, I know you killed him but it’s not like he put you in his will? Did he?”

Sarah laughed harshly and briefly. “As if,” she huffed. “Dash, no one remembers their account numbers and passwords. He had them all written down in the locked office like anyone else. Took me a while to find them, but once I did, there was no problem doing electronic transfers and stuff. Security questions weren’t that hard either once I went through enough stuff to figure out his mother’s maiden name and his place of birth and shit. Hell, he waxed poetic about his childhood more than a few times while raping me. Paying attention to his diarrhetic spewing about his pets and his cars and crap was better than thinking about what he was doing to me.”

“Sounds like a nasty chunk of work,” Peter said, “but apparently a hard worker if he could afford this.”

“Yeah, I think he was in investments or something along those lines,” Sarah said. “Finance-related, anyway. Also got plenty of money and items to fence from his criminal activities as Mister Master.”

“That name popped up now and again starting a few years back,” Peter said, frowning, “but I didn’t know much about him. Query wasn’t really all that reactive back then, so he probably doesn’t know much either.”

“Guess he was better than the average crook then,” Sarah said. “Anyway, I set up automatic payments from his accounts for some things he didn’t already have set up that way. The mortgage and taxes for this place and the utilities and all that will be covered for at least the next three years. After that, I guess I’ll have to move out.”

“Nobody knows he’s dead?” Peter asked.

“Struck me as being the kind of guy nobody was sorry to see never come back to the office or the family reunions. He was creepy when I first met him.”

“How did you get his keys with the jolty bolty thing on your neck back then?” Peter asked.

“I stepped over some lines enough times to exhaust the battery in the collar,” Sarah answered matter-of-factly, squaring her shoulders a bit and taking a deep breath. “Gave myself a couple days off in between each jolt cuz I was afraid I might fry my brain. Took four times.”

“Cheezy Louise-y!” Peter said. “Honey, you’re one tough petunia.”

“Determined or desperate, more likely,” she countered. “But they look the same as toughness sometimes.”

There was a long pause, during which she silently slipped her right hand into his left again and they simply stood there. Peter tried to process it all through the chaotic filter of his mind and seized upon one thing above all others. Eight rooms she had shown him. But that wasn’t the entirety of the place. There was a ninth one that Sarah had rushed him past at least three times now.

“Would it be impolitic to ask what’s in there?”

“Impolite, you mean?” she asked, then seemed to change the subject as she blurted, “You wanna stay over tonight after we do a patrol as Mad Dash and Honey Badger?”

“Sure. Yeah,” Peter said. “Ummmm, is this the night…”

She busted out laughing. There was a sad look in the back of her eyes, but mostly amusement. “No, tonight won’t be the night I take your virginity and find out if I can even have sex anymore. Wouldn’t mind a cuddle, though. And someone to help keep the nightmares away.”

“Sure, Honey. No problem.”

He realized Sarah’s question and offer to stay over wasn’t a diversion when she sighed heavily and said, “Well, then, if you’ll be staying here in the place I creepily live in, since it’s stuffed full of memories of my abuse and psychological torture, you should know what’s in that room.” After a long pause, she stated, “He is.”

“Mister Master?” Peter gasped. “Right now?”

“Yep,” she responded.

“Isn’t that un-hyphenic and stuff? And stinkerific?”

“You know those big bags they sell for storing your sweaters and stuff in off-season? They’re like big Ziploc baggies?”

“Uh. Yeah. But…”

“…Once you’ve chopped up a body into about four equal portions, they slide in really nicely. I bought a bunch of them. Quadruple bagged each big hunk of that sadistic motherfucker and then stuck the bags in four plastic bins with lids. Then I quadruple-bagged the bloody mattress and bedding in mattress bags. I’m sure after a couple years he’s liquified by now and there’s a nice toxic soup in those bags that can send me straight to prison. Oh, well. You can understand why I don’t invite many people over. Like, ever. Never before now, in fact.”

“But even with all the bags and closed door and spiffy air fresheners, can’t you…”

“My super-powered nose can smell him a little. If I pay attention. I tune it out, mostly. When I notice, I figure it’s a good reminder of how I got where I am today and why I do what I do.”

“I guess I three-wish you hadn’t had to go through any of that but if you didn’t, I guess I wouldn’t have met you,” Peter said, shuffling a bit. His feet didn’t stop moving until her hand slipped into his once more.

“Yeah, life’s fucked up that way, ain’t it?” she said, and led him to the kitchen so they could eat before suiting up and going on patrol.

Several hours later, after they had returned from patrol, they slipped up to the condo that had once belonged to Mister Master, masks off and wearing long coats to conceal their costumes from prying eyes. Exhausted, Sarah pulled off her coat and tossed her mask to the ground, leading Peter to her small bedroom. She quickly slipped under the covers with the faux-fur-trimmed outfit still on—as she did, he barely heard her mumble, “Too soon to see; too soon to show him”—then she told Peter which drawer to open to find her workout clothes so that he wouldn’t have to sleep in his costume.

And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me naked or in my underwear, or she’d probably be that way herself, he told himself. And she wouldn’t have told me where to find something to wear.

As Sarah drifted off to sleep, Peter remained awake for some time. He thought about the fact he was wearing a women’s pair of black yoga pants and a pink T-shirt with red lettering that read: Redheads Rock! He thought about how even with the air conditioning going, it was way too hot tonight to be spooning a woman wearing a partially furred costume. He considered the fact that just a few doors away, the putrefied remains of a rapist and murderer were locked behind a bedroom door.

Mad Dash buried his face in the auburn hair of the woman mostly dressed as Honey Badger right now, sniffed deeply of the shampoo and sweat there, and figured that despite all that, he was the luckiest man alive.

(Crimson mask image for Odium modified from an image of Black Panther; character copyright of Marvel Comics)

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The Gathering Storm, Part 21

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After the tense visit by Janus’ men, a nearly half-hour-long flogging at Hush-a-Bye’s hands had been very therapeutic, and now—flushed and covered with a sheen of sweat all over his bare, bruised, welted and blood-streaked torso—GoodKnight stood near her.

“Ya did real well dealing with Janus, today, Hush-a-Bye,” he said.

“It isn’t your place to tell me when I’ve done well,” she noted imperiously.

“It is my place sometimes. You’ve come a long way, but yer still learning. I’m impressed but I’ve still got worries after all this time. Like ya don’t speak in the same style as the original Hush-a-Bye. Yer more formal and haughty. Especially tonight.”

“You hired me to fill the void she left so that you could continue to hide the fact that the sleep and silence powers actually are your own and have someone who presents the proper demeanor you require. You paid for extensive plastic surgery so that I could pass for her and no one would know the difference. I did not sign up to actually become her, however. I will carry the name and the duties and reap the rewards, but I am who I am. If anyone notices that Hush-a-Bye sounds more like landed gentry now, we can chalk it up to a change in demeanor due to the growth of our criminal enterprise and the rise of my power.”

“Our enterprise? Your power?” he responded, an edge in his voice. But there was a tremor there of something other than simply irritation. Hush-a-Bye wasn’t sure if it was hope, longing or trepidation. Perhaps a mix of them?

This might be the moment of truth; it’s been a long time coming.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “I am our voice. I am the one who presents as the power behind this enterprise, while you make plans in secret and use your powers and let everyone think they’re my powers. I do that for you and for our mutual gain, but in the end, I am your mistress and you are my slave. That is the dynamic you seek, and that is what you hired me for. But long-term, I cannot simply be a hired domme with a submissive client. We must evolve to something more organic and permanent. You know that. Or are you not a true submissive? Do you simply plan to hire a series of dommes one after another and change their faces? Or do you want a stable relationship and a firm hand to ground you? To hold your leash and discipline you.”

GoodKnight gritted his teeth, but in frustration, not anger.

“Hush-a-Bye…”

“Mistress,” she interrupted him.

He paused, took a deep breath, and lowered himself to his knees, bending his head to gaze at the ground as he spoke. “Mistress, this is an awkward situation. Hush-a-Bye’s death was early. Unexpected. I always knew she might die or might wanna retire from being in the thick of things. But it was too soon. The plan had always been to find someone before then for her to train up. Someone who’d dominate me but be under her. In a perfect world…”

“In an ideal world, I would have learned from the bottom up—the business of crime and the business of ruling over you. To submit before I dominated. Just like all the best mistresses I’ve ever known. But this isn’t an ideal world, worm,” she sneered. “I’ve bottomed before—long ago—and while I might have been willing to do it again for your first Hush-a-Bye, if she were still alive, I won’t do it for you. You are mine, not the other way around.”

He winced at that, feeling defensive and guilty all at once. “Mistress, I do obey you. I carry guns now, at your command, just like ya told me, even though it’s knives I really like and really trust. I take yer lashes with gratitude and grace. I…”

“Obey me in all things, big and small, not simply what you choose to obey,” she said firmly. “Give your whole self to me, not just a part.”

“Mistress, Hush-a-Bye and me…we were a team. A unit. We built our criminal activities together from the ground up. It wasn’t just a mistress-slave relationship. There was love there, too. I lost more than just a domme that night.”

“All the most rewarding mistress-slave relationships will have love in them. We can reach that point. Perhaps soon. But first you must let go of control and submit to me fully,” she said. She could see his shoulders slump just a tiny fraction; could almost feel a kind of psychic tension break.

She’d always been very good at being a bondage and S&M professional and, before she decided to trade in her old face and name for Hush-a-Bye’s, she’d made a good living at it. The level of obedience and loyalty she’d been able to command from clients had sometimes made her wonder if she had Psi or Primal transhuman powers or simply a commanding personality. But regardless, in all these long months, GoodKnight had been resistant—a fact that irked her on personal and professional levels. Now, she felt she had reached a tipping point, whether by force of personality or possible transhuman abilities of her own.

Have I finally put a crack in that resistance? Because if I don’t, there could be trouble for both of us going forward, she worried.

“You have the transhuman powers, GoodKnight; I’m the misdirection so that people don’t know that. You have the proven experience in conducting successful criminal activities and mobilizing criminal minions, so you are the brains for the scheming,” she said to him as she loomed above his kneeling, half naked body and admired the bruises and bloody stripes with which she had marked his back and shoulders. “However, I am the face. I am the voice. I stood up to Janus today without hesitation and proved I’m fully ready. I am the one who says what will be done and why. We are partners. But I make the final decision in all things, in every facet of your life. There was no Hush-a-Bye before; forget her. There was a good woman who paved the way for my arrival. There is only the Hush-a-Bye that is now. Leave the past behind and kneel to embrace the present and future, or forsake all hope of any pleasure and any peace of mind.”

“I…I want…”

“I command,” she said. “And you obey. Or you do not obey, and I leave you to your solitude and misery. There is no want. Not for you. That is my purview. For you, there is the ability and even necessity to advise me and guide me, but above all, in the end, to obey me and protect me.”

She was startled for a moment as he made a strange choking sound, and then smiled when she realized he was sobbing.

“I’m…I’m sorry…Mistress,” he said haltingly. “I’ve been…outta line. For too long. I’m nothing. I…beg forgiveness.”

One red-gloved hand stroked the black leather of the hood that covered almost his entire head, and she said, “Weep upon my boots, and lick up those tears. Wash my feet in your sorrow and your acceptance, and clean the salty residue from the leather with your kisses. That is your penance, and our true beginning.”

* * *

I’m a transhuman in costume, Zoe thought bitterly, but in a very unflattering one and not for a very heroic role.

She turned to one of her few good friends at the university, spread her arms wide, and said, “These graduation gowns are ugly as crap. They make me look and feel fat. The cap doesn’t help a bit, either, and I can barely get it to stay on my locs even with a billion bobby pins.”

“Suck it up and wear it with dignity, Zoe,” the classmate said. “Today we become real adult women, so that we can give our time and talents over to The Man in exchange for paychecks and healthcare benefits.”

Zoe chuckled at that, but she was still nervous about today. Underworld had told her Janus would let her have her graduation. Even if that was true—and this close to the event it seemed it was—that still meant that this was her last day of whatever passed for peace of mind and security since the day the recruitment and intimidation process had begun. But she wasn’t helpless, so she could still laugh. She wasn’t alone, even though she had no idea what Query was doing or whether it would help her.

Time to stand with my class, and hope for the best, she thought. At least if I end up in  Janus’ clutches, I should have my diploma when I do. Maybe I can negotiate a better cut of the criminal profits with that piece of paper, she joked with herself silently and bitterly.

* * *

Two more Guardian Corps patrols had been ambushed in the past week, and it was making Cole nervous. Not so much for himself but for the future of the Corps. Everyone seemed to be on edge, and their enemies in New Judah, especially the five toughest neighborhoods on which they concentrated their efforts, seemed to know where they were going to be much of the time now.

Making it worse was the fact that all of the recent ambushes had been against major operations. Against plans by the Corps to take down big targets. It was a wonder, Cole thought, that no one had been killed in the past two skirmishes, though a couple of the injured had come close to meeting their ends.

Cole was waiting outside Desperado’s office just as he had been told to do, and it was just a couple days after overhearing part of a strategy meeting and catching hell for supposed eavesdropping.

And the hell of it all was that I was only there to hear everything because I was doing something Desperado told me to do, he thought as a sense of déjà vu hit home.

That sensation and the memory of the previous dressing-down made made his gut twist even more when the office door opened and three people left, all of them high-ranking members of the Corps and among them one of the two lieutenants Desperado had been briefing that last time. The man gave Cole a curious look, and then over his shoulder called back to Desperado, “This little punk seems to hang around your office an awful lot.”

“Yeah, yeah he does, doesn’t he?” Desperado said, leaning against the doorway and fingering the hilt of one of his revolvers.

“But you…” Cole began.

Cutting him off, Desperado said, “Shut up, get the fuck in here and let’s address some shit, Cole.”

Calling me by my real name instead of my codename Quantum means he’s pissed, Cole realized. I’ve finally figured that out. Around here, that’s a bigger insult than slapping a name like “Puppy” onto a new recruit.

“Fuck,” Cole muttered under his breath, and shambled into the office to be dressed down yet again.

* * *

As Zoe was pulling her gown off over her head, she couldn’t see the startled looks on the faces of fellow students all around her who had been, like her, returning their gowns at one of the smaller tents that had been set up in the commons for the post-graduation activities. But she did hear the rapid popping sounds of bullets being fired nearby.

She sensed people scattering around her as she struggled out of the gown to free up her limbs and her vision—as she began the metabolic shift of her Morph powers.

Oh shit it’s happening, her panicked mind repeated several times as she finally threw off the gown. Underworld wasn’t fucking kidding about the deadline. Talk about a literal graduation day cut-off to my reprieve.

Something struck her, and then another something, and she felt stunning jolts throughout her body even as her skin began to toughen and her hair and nails become razor sharp potential weapons.

Too slow, though. Too late. As she stiffened, relaxed, and then tumbled over her own feet, she was out before she hit the ground, her last thoughts being: Fuck my life.

* * *

As disguises went, it wasn’t the best in the world, but by standing in the shadows and ducking his head a lot, the human-face mask over his black mask didn’t have to be all that detailed—just easy to yank off.

And a fake graduation gown hides a multitude of “fuck you up” toys, Query mused.

When the assault team rushed out of a nearby van toward Zoe as she was pulling off her gown, Query was ready. The presence of a van already had him alert; the scent of sweat, gun oil and more from inside when he passed by it earlier made him infinitely more so.

He didn’t like the idea of letting them actually reach Zoe, but it seemed the best course. The more they thought they had things in the bag, the better for him and for the element of surprise. Also, since he didn’t know whether Zoe would be a help or a hindrance in a fight, it made sense to have her down and more or less safely out of the way.

When the two tasers struck home and felled her as she finally yanked off her gown, Query pulled off his fake graduation cap, peeled off the black covering and revealed what really lay beneath—a metal disc with several nodules around the edge. He flung it into the van and covered his face for a moment as the series of mini flashbangs went off.

That takes care of the backup team members and the getaway driver.

That left four armed men in light body armor. Ripping off his faux graduation gown, and hoping he’d put the right amount of weights around the hem of it, he flung it like a net over the head of the nearest abductor and pressed a button on his belt as it draped the man’s entire upper torso. Query heard the hacking and gasping as the small gas bomb inside went off  and took him down, even as he rushed the next-nearest man and caught him in an armlock before he could bring his gun to bear. Query put a tree in between himself and one of the other two remaining men, and his mostly immobilized enemy in between himself and the other perpetrator.

To Query’s dismay, that man had enough sense, good reflexes and combat savvy not to fire his weapon.

So much for getting him to maim or kill my human shield, he thought, and pulled out a small cylinder from one of the inside pockets of his leather duster. He jammed one end of it into the lower back of his prisoner and as the needle shot forth and delivered the contents of the ampule inside, he dropped the man to the ground to let him quiver and shake, soon to pass out.

Or, if he’s allergic to what I gave him, to die of anaphylaxis, he considered. No great loss to society if so.

Coming around the other side of the tree, and having been more or less tracking one of the two remaining men by hearing—difficult but not impossible with the yells and screams of bystanders all around—Query had a Walther P99 out and ready.

His first 9mm bullet went a little high and barely grazed the man’s hip; the second hit him squarely in a kneecap. As the man stumbled and fell with a shout, Query shot him with a tranquilizer dart from a gun in his right hand, then tossed the now-useless weapon away since it could only hold one dart.

In other circumstances against armed men like this I’d be more inclined for the lethal approach since bullets are more plentiful and effective, but there are too many bystanders and I’m likely to have police involvement. No reason to make my life any more complicated by killing anyone—even the bad guys.

The fourth and final man shot Query right in the heart, and the costumed hero spun nearly 360 degrees to his right and around the back of another tree, less from the impact of the bullet than a desire to avoid getting shot again.

That hurt, asshole, but you made a bad decision in the heat of the moment. That’s the most heavily armored part of my costume.

Query wasn’t eager to find out how well the lighter armor in his mask would take a bullet—and this remaining man would likely be smart enough to go for a headshot this time—so when he came out from behind his cover, Query flung a pair of tanglers at his final opponent, one after the other. The first exploded against a shin, sending out an array of sticky tendrils, most of them attaching themselves to nearby trees and a few sticking to his other leg. As the man stumbled, the second tangler ended up hitting him in one shoulder instead of his head, but it was still enough to hinder his gun hand and ensure Query could restrain him easily and then attend to all of his friends.

Janus, you’re a bastard for not showing up yourself, Query thought as he finished up with the four men outside and moved on to handcuffing the stunned occupants of the van. But I knew that would be a long-shot.

Retrieving the tranquilizer gun he had tossed aside earlier, Query took stock of his surroundings. He didn’t see any casualties aside from the perpetrators he had subdued—except for the shots at Query, the gunfire from the abduction team had been intended to clear people out of the area.

Zoe was groaning, and the fact she was already getting up confirmed the suspicions he’d had when he saw her skin color and texture shift a bit, along with the texture of her hair—all of which had returned to normal once she had been stunned. In addition to being an Acro, she was a Morph, and likely the change she had initiated provided her some protection against the twin taser shots.

He stepped over to her, and held out his left arm, saying, “You all right, Miss Dawson?”

Blinking and realizing who was standing there, she took the proffered hand and he pulled her upright. As she got to her feet fully, she yelped “Ouch!” and yanked back her hand.

“What?” he asked. “Something wrong?”

“You just stabbed me in the wrist or something,” she complained, rubbing at a small wound there.

He took her wrist lightly and turned it back and forth to examine it. “Sorry about that. I’ve got plenty of sharp edges all over. Probably a bit of my light armor has a little bent edge after that melee. Just a small cut. You OK otherwise, though?”

“Yeah,” she said, taking stock of the trussed-up team. “Wow. You took out six people by yourself?”

“Seven if you count the driver. Helps that I wasn’t expected,” he said with a snort, hearing approaching sirens.

“Is it over?” she asked hopefully, craning her head to get a better look at some of the men who’d tried to abduct her. He suspected she was looking for signs that one of the perps might be Janus.

“Doubt it. But I’m on to some leads to track this back to the source and head things off next time,” Query lied. Then, because it always felt better to him to temper such lies with truth, he added, “But if anyone comes again, I plan to keep showing up. He won’t send as many people next time most likely. As it starts costing him too much, he’ll stop coming at you.”

“I wasn’t sure you were even doing anything all this time,” she admitted.

“I take my jobs seriously, Zoe, even the pro bono ones. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d rather leave before the police get here, but I’m sure you can tell them enough,” Query said. “As well as press charges, I assume,” he added with as jovial a lilt as he could muster.

“Bet on it,” she said with a smile as he brushed by her and headed away from the sirens.

Sorry to keep using you as bait, Zoe, but at least I can be pretty sure he won’t try to kill you, Query thought as he beat his hasty retreat, wishing he could have taken one or two of the abduction team with him for interrogation, though it was unlikely they knew Janus’ whereabouts. Let’s just hope I don’t slip up and let him take you where I can’t follow.

* * *

“Rare Query sighting in the daytime, sir,” Jeremiah said as he entered Fortunato’s office. “He seems to have foiled an armed attempt today to kidnap a graduating senior from UConn’s New Judah campus.”

“A bit more colorful and dramatic than his usual fare,” Fortunato said.

“And a strike team of seven that he took out, no less, with vests, riot helmets, automatic weapons and more,” Jeremiah added.

“My oh my. What is this student heir to, that someone should be so eager to abduct him and that Query should be on alert and waiting in the wings?”

“Actually, sir, a young woman of no particular means at all, except for being a skilled enough athlete to earn a full scholarship,” Jeremiah answered. “However, some of our inside sources in the police have passed along some information that your analysts found interesting, in that the team Query took down may be directly or loosely attached to the group Janus hired to kill him recently.”

“So, Janus still has an inexplicable animosity toward Query, and their antics have become more public. Well, Jeremiah, it’s looking like my decision to build a team is even more prescient than I thought—and maybe this recent twist will make it more likely we can convince Query to sign up.”

* * *

Nearly everyone was on edge on Janus’ floors and Underworld’s floor of the building. By all accounts, Janus was furious about the failure of the operation to kidnap Zoe, and even more so about Query’s involvement in thwarting the abduction.

She bought that story for about 15 minutes until she came to her senses. Everyone else could continue believing the rage was real, but probably the only part of it that was would be true was the irritation about Query’s presence. Janus wanted Query dead very badly, for reasons she still didn’t understand, so it was likely the hero popping up now would anger him.

But the rest rang hollow. The team Janus had sent against Zoe was a good one, to be sure—if it had been sent against a normal person. But Zoe was potentially valuable enough for Janus to have Underworld woo her, so he must suspect she had strong talents or knew of significant powers that he hadn’t revealed to anyone else. Also, he couldn’t have been fool enough to think Zoe might not have tried to secure some kind of transhuman aid since she knew she was being pursued by transhumans.

Both factors would have indicated that the team should include at least one person with a strong power set, if not two of them, and that the operation should never have been carried out so boldly in broad daylight.

Janus isn’t that stupid or sloppy, so why did he order an operation that had a decent chance of failing? Underworld pondered, fuming silently. And why is he keeping me in the dark?

On the way to his office, she spotted Crazy Jane coming around the corner at the other end of the hall, a bright smile on her tattooed face. Underworld’s steps faltered as she considered turning around, but then the compulsion to be near Jane kicked in, and she semi-reluctantly continued forward.

I need to confront the bastard anyway, and to get to him I’ve got to go past her.

“Hi, Undie,” Crazy Jane said. “It’s been a couple days since I’ve seen you. Miss ya! See ya soon,” she concluded as she glided by Underworld and skipped down the remainder of the hall.

Underworld felt a little flood of relief, not just because Crazy Jane hadn’t lingered but, she realized, because she’d given Underworld her much-needed fix.

I needed to see her and hear her voice, and now I have, and it makes me feel better; makes me want to call her up for coffee soon. Shit.

That reminded Underworld of her suspicions that Janus was probably behind Jane setting her hooks into her to begin with, and simply reinforced her commitment to confront him.

She burst into his office moments later without preamble; without knocking.

“Now is not the time!” Janus bellowed. “Come back—”

“Cut the bullshit, you douche-plug,” she responded curtly. “Drop the act.”

“Which act would that be?” he asked, voice suddenly calm and with a playful, teasing hint to his words.

“Take your pick,” she said. “But what the hell, how about I go ahead with lady’s choice? Let’s start with the botched attempt to nab a woman you’ve had me working so hard to bring into our fold. You didn’t consult me on the team, you didn’t tell me you were sending one, and you fucked it up—on purpose. Why?”

“Well, I didn’t actually want it to fail,” Janus said. “That would just be stupid. I don’t throw money and men away, and I do want lovely Zoe to join us. However, I felt there was a high probability things might go south, so I wanted to test the waters without risking any of our more valuable assets.”

“So, are we giving up on Zoe now, or are you going to let me pick a proper team this time with a plan that is actually designed with a win firmly in mind?”

Janus made a show of leaning back dramatically in his chair and putting his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling for several moments before saying, “Oh…fine…you go ahead and show me how it’s done, Underworld.”

“Great. Only problem for you is that I don’t think you’ll be alive to congratulate me when I nab her.”

Janus sat up, and behind the half-comedy/half-drama theater mask he had chosen to wear today, his eyes regarded her more intently, a glint of intrigue in them. “Oh? And why are you stepping up any plans you might have to part me from my mortal coil?”

“Crazy Jane.”

“I know you’ve occasionally gone to your side of the gender line for sexual recreation, Underworld, but I didn’t realize you wanted to steal my girlfriend. So unlike you.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she snapped. “You directed her to nail me with her addictive powers.”

“Why would I do that? We both know their effects aren’t as dramatic on transhumans, and I’d hardly want competition for her time and affections, especially with her pet projects she spends so much time on. I’m the jealous type.”

“Yeah. Jealous and greedy and grasping, which is why you wanted her to make biochemical friends with me because if we’re BFFs, I won’t jump ship from this operation you shanghaied me into joining,” Underworld said.

“Intriguing notion. It’s possible I might even have thought of such a thing,” Janus said. “However, I don’t see why this would make you want to kill me, even if it is true.”

“Because you’ve messed with me in a fundamental and really fucking disturbing way. I may not be able to take any of this out on Jane thanks to her little hold on my affections now, but I can take it out on the person who sicced her on me.”

“Oh, but if that were so, you wouldn’t dare,” Janus said smoothly.

“Why not?”

“Kill me openly and obviously, and Jane would be angry with you. I’m her main man. Her first love. Her true blue. And she cares enough to have a hold on me, too. Take me away, and she’d likely take her attentions away from you in retaliation. It wouldn’t devastate you like it would a normal person, but it already hurts to consider it, doesn’t it? Hurts your heart a bit—metaphorically, that is. You like her regard too much to risk losing it.”

“Bastard,” Underworld hissed.

“And, if you were to kill me clandestinely,” he continued, unfazed, “you’d still risk that she’d suspect you of avenging yourself on me. The more you consider it, the more unpleasant the consequences of taking me out are, aren’t they? In fact, you’ll probably have to consider the necessity of making extra-sure I stay alive, just in case any harm I might come to might look like it was orchestrated by you.”

“Shit!” Underworld spat, turning and storming toward the door. “This isn’t over!” she shouted without turning back.

“I know! Toodles! Go take your anger out on Query by snatching Zoe, please. Thanks oodles!”

Janus smiled and leaned back in his chair, sighing.

If not for Query still being alive, I’d say everything was going perfectly.

[ – To view the next chapter, click here – ]

The Gathering Storm, Part 19

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After the latest recruitment dinner with Zoe—and possibly the last, given how much other work there was to do between now and the woman’s graduation deadline—Underworld was relieved to get back the the headquarters. Not only did she dearly want to get out of her disguise and take a long, hot bath, but she had been under the nagging suspicion she was being followed. She’d taken a few extra twists and turns in her return trip and had herself scanned by two different teams instead of just the one that Janus required. That had easily added an extra hour onto her travels and further delayed her chance to relax and get some time alone.

What was anything but a relief was to run into Crazy Jane within seconds after getting into the more secure areas of the building. The woman was wearing flannel pajamas with PowerPuff Girls characters all over them, the top unbuttoned just enough to reveal most of a very fresh tattoo that extended the artwork of the woman’s flesh beyond her head for the first time—an intricate, sexy, blue-skinned, devil-style woman extending down one side of her neck, the splayed legs riding the very top of one side of her bosom.

“Oh, gosh, Undie, we were getting worried,” Jane said, her fingers interlaced as if she had just been wringing her hands in concern. “So glad to have you back safe and sound.”

The appearance so suddenly of Crazy Jane and the sight of that new tattoo—I’m an alumna of DePaul University, whose mascot is a blue demon, she thought—put her off guard, and she didn’t move quickly enough to avoid a quick and strong hug from Jane. Such a warm and sisterly gesture, it seemed, but it made Underworld stiffen and her chest seized a little in a pang of anxiety.

“Welcome, home,” Crazy Jane said, then skipped happily out of sight. As Jane left, Underworld realized the pajamas had a number of red stains on the left leg and left shoulder, and she wondered if they were blood—and whose.

Shaking her head a little—and her knees shaking a little themselves from the brief but unnerving exchange—Underworld hurried to her floor of the building to find the comfort and privacy or her own quarters.

I keep trying to avoid Janus’ little psycho-girl, and I keep running into her. She keeps trying to ingratiate herself with me when all I want is distance from her scary self, Underworld thought. And yet I can almost never seem to find my voice to tell her to go away. I get anxious seeing her and then it almost feels weird when I go a few hours without bumping into her. And then when I do it almost seems right and welcome…

Underworld stopped, her breath catching in her chest. She leaned against one wall and then started pounding it over and over with one fist.

No no no no no. Fuck! Why didn’t I see it? She’s been using her powers on me. Just like with Janus, she’s introduced a kind of addiction to her. She scares me, but part of me is beginning to want her around.

Worse than that, Underworld realized, the process wasn’t just beginning. It was clearly already well along. Crazy Jane had been calculating and intentional in all these encounters. As she followed her memories backward, Underworld realized when it must have begun. When they physically ran into each other in the hall that one day, after she had convniced Janus to let Shrill join on. That physical contact from their impact, along with Crazy Jane handing some files back to her, allowed for the initial connection—the biochemical infection of Underworld’s mind.

Then random “chance” meetings that were anything but, so that Crazy Jane could keep using her short-range mental abilities to keep reinforcing the bond and building the addiction to her.

Underworld had thoroughly read the reports on Jane’s powers—as Janus has told her and the scientific reports had confirmed, almost invariably transhuman powers dulled the effects of Crazy Jane’s influence over a person. She wouldn’t be able to make Underworld a slave to her will like some normal person, but she’d be able to worm her way into her mind just enough—and probably long since had done so—to ensure that Underworld wouldn’t get rid of her, plot against her or…

…or leave Janus’ operation,  Underworld realized. It’s not just a trap to protect herself from me and gain some tiny bit of way to influence me subtly at times—it’s meant to prevent me from bolting once I figured I had enough money to just go.

And that made her wonder how much Crazy Jane was acting alone, and how much was at Janus’ direction. Underworld’s mind reeled in a mix of anxiety and anger; fear and secret pleasure. She was disgusted with the situation and with herself for not having figured it out sooner. And yet it all felt so right somehow.

In her apartment, Underworld shed her clothes and retreated to the relative safety and comfort of a deep, hot, bubble-filled bath. She briefly considered calling in one of her personal male assistants to drive all the conflicted thoughts about Crazy Jane out of her mind, at least temporarily, but then decided against it.

After all, she wanted to be alone right?

And there was already someone here with her, like it or not.

Jane. Or a ghost of her, anyway. Adding a man right now would just make things too crowded.

The woman had infiltrated her mind and body, and Underworld realized that as creepy as that struck her, there was a comfort in it as well. She pondered amidst steaming water and the scent of bath oils, trying to sort it all out and figure out her next steps in dealing with her revelation.

And, as she tried to revel in her solitude, she realized that she kind of missed Crazy Jane already.

Fuck.

* * *

William Bastion lifted a glass of wine, and wondered how many more he would need to get through this meal.

William Bastion. Successful physician. Father of a young and very sweet and intelligent girl. Devoted son and brother. Pillar of the community. Member of the First Union Church. Member of the Rotary Club. Member of an intramural volleyball team each summer.

Oh, and estranged husband of Tooth Fairy.

That last one had been quite a surprise to him when one of the most dangerous and cruel transhuman villains around had arrived at his home and started talking to him. And the voice she spoke with was Theresa Bastion’s.

The wife who had disappeared so many months before, and left no trace of where she had gone.

In the time since then, relatively brief though it had been, Will had done his best to reconcile himself with the fact that his wife hadn’t left him to run off with some other man or to retreat to some other state or country, but had been committing crimes in the city just minutes away from their suburban home. He had done his best to repress the guilt that his attempt to ensure their daughter would be born a transhuman had led Theresa to go beyond his instructions and expose herself directly to the chemical meant for her womb, changing her into the woman who became Tooth Fairy. He had also done his best to drive down the fear that she would be back to speak with him again.

He had not, however, expected a dinner date, and that threw all his careful mental preparations completely out the window.

She wasn’t wearing her Tooth Fairy costume, and the way she shifted uncomfortably at times and kept adjusting the neck of her blouse with one finger suggested to him that she was more comfortable in the role of a transhuman villain than Theresa Bastion. But despite the discomfort she showed, she was still quite capable of killing him, he knew, and she remained in full control of the evening.

He hadn’t argued when she picked out his food and ordered his steak to be cooked nearly rare. Or corrected her when she ordered wine for both of them, when what he wanted was scotch. Or even criticized her when she she not only ate most of the Oysters Rockefeller appetizer but also munched on some of the oyster shells themselves when no one but he was looking.

“I really should apologize for having left you in the dark for so many months about where I had gone, Will,” she said, “but I’m not going to because it really doesn’t matter. You’ll adjust after all, won’t you? You have a survival instinct, right?”

“I guess this won’t be a romantic evening, then?” Will said, trying to sound nonchalant even though a part of his mind wanted to simply send him running from the table while vacating his bladder.

“Oh, we’re a middle-aged married couple, Will. We’re soooo beyond romance,” Tooth Fairy teased, but with a cruel edge to her voice. “I admit I haven’t really had non-battery-related sex in all the time I’ve been gone, though, so maybe out behind the alley we can have a roll for old time’s sake, or get a room or something. I promise not to bite anything off.”

Will suppressed the urge to shiver, both from stark terror and the spark of desire—this was his wife, after all, and no matter how angry he had been at her disappearance or how frightened he was of her changes, there was somewhere inside this cruel creature across the table from him a kind woman named Theresa. He still desired her on some level; after all, he’d not had any other woman since they’d married.

Well, there was that nursing director a few years ago, but it was only a few times we got together and then I came to my senses, he considered. But I don’t think this is a stage in Theresa’s life when I can share that indiscretion.

“That would be very considerate of you, honey,” Will said, marveling at how the affectation still rolled off tongue with relative ease, despite everything. “Not to bite anything off, that is.”

“You’re so sweet, Will. And you’re taking all of this so well. Now, you haven’t done anything silly like contact the police, have you? Or the FBI. Or the NSA. Or the American Dental Association.”

“No. I’m kind of interested in living long enough to see our daughter graduate from high school one day. Hopefully college. Maybe lead her down the aisle for her wedding…”

“…or maybe watch her take after her wildly successful mother?” Tooth Fairy prompted.

“I admit I’d be less eager to see that. No offense, but…”

“Oh, I understand, Will. Murder and mayhem dismay you. They might bother her, too, in which case maybe she’ll have a great career as a cat burglar or extortionist or something like that. So much will depend on what kinds of powers she develops.”

“If she develops any,” Will pointed out.

“I have faith,” Tooth Fairy said. “Now, about our precious little girl. I’ve been away a while, and it’s time for me to reintroduce myself into her life. You can tell the neighbors, co-workers, family and such whatever tale you like about my return. Just keep it simple. I don’t want to deal with any complex lies that require me to remember too much. Maybe something along the lines of, ‘She decided she hated her family, in-laws and former friends and left to be away from all of them, and she can just stand her husband enough to be a part of her daughter’s life.’ Because I’m not going to be puttering around the house or sleeping over or anything. Though I will have our girl stay with me from time to time.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good…”

“I won’t let her see me in costume or doing my line of work until she’s old enough to keep a secret, Will. But I might want the occasional overnight or weekend. I’m still her mother. I think I can manage a couple days in a row of maternal instinct now and again.”

“I’m concerned about your state of mind and what kind of effect you might have on her own peace of mind, or…or…”

“Moral compass? Sense of right and wrong? Well, you’re going to have to trust me, Will. Because the alternative is to make her fatherless. Neither of us wants that.  You least of all. You want the slim chance of walking her down the aisle, and I don’t want to deal with full-time motherhood until she’s older and her powers have emerged anyway.”

Taking a swig of the wine he didn’t desire but so very clearly needed, Will said, “I’m not sure that negotiating from a position of threat is the best way to go about things if you want to keep things amicable.”

Tooth Fairy snatched the glass away from him, drained it, refilled it from the bottle beside the table, handed it back to him and gave him a lascivious grin. “Whyever not do it that way, Will? Threats have served me so well all this time since I left your side. Besides, on the subject of A-words, while I may entertain some amorous notions later, amicable was never one of my aims.”

* * *

Collating and stapling a couple hundred photocopies of the quarterly Guardian Corps newsletter outside of Desperado’s office certainly wasn’t a task that Cole had really expected to be assigned tonight. In fact, it seemed downright humiliating, but Desperado had told him he’d be going out on a patrol after 11 tonight with a couple of the long-term veterans of the operation, so that took away some of the sting. Besides, he’d long since stopped trying to figure out the man’s mood swings or random passive-aggressive actions.

The lowly office task was made all the stranger and potentially more burdensome when he realized Desperado was having an important meeting and talking about things that Cole probably wasn’t supposed to be privy to. He felt like a lurker so close to the door, and he considered stepping away, but Desperado had been clear that this was a task that needed to be done ASAP.

In fact, his exact words had been: “Don’t stop collating these bastards until they’re all done, even if it means you piss your pants. Don’t worry, though—I’ll have someone else do the folding and distribution who’s pissed me off more than you have this week.”

So he heard it all when Desperado talked about the very likely possibility that there was a traitor in the Guardian Corps who had been feeding information about patrol patterns and schedules. There had been two more ambushes, and Desperado had a plan to change things up secretly and schedule some fake patrols to help flush out the traitor.

Cole heard it all, and when Desperado came out, gave him a withering and suspicious look, then shot a “who the fuck does he think he is” look back at his command team, Cole considered saying, “But you told me not to leave this job.”

Instead, he remained silent, hunched his shoulders and lowered his head, and got back to collating, feeling hot and suspicious stares burning into him as he did.

* * *

On the seventh ring, Crazy Jane answered her phone, with a chipper, “Oh, hi, Undie. Sorry, If I knew it was you calling, I would have answered sooner. I was just in the middle of fiddling with Dr. Mark’s sanity and stuff. He is coming along so well, I just can’t tell you how…”

“Jane, stop,” Underworld said wearily, both from emotional exhaustion and lack of sleep the night before, filled with anxiety as she had been. “I know what you’ve been doing to me. I need…”

“Oh, goodie!!!” Crazy Jane effused, almost shrieking with delight. “I am soooo glad you’ve figured it out. That’s gonna save so much on all that sneaking around, and you won’t keep wondering why…”

“Jane, stop,” Underworld said again but this time with a double meaning. “I mean it. Stop. Please stop talking and please stop messing with my mind.”

“But you like it, don’t you?” Crazy Jane said, with an almost purring undertone to her words. “And you’re starting to really like me now, aren’t you?”

“No, no, no. Jane, I don’t like you. You scare me. There, I admit it. Big, tough Underworld is scared of something. You’re creepy, you’re…”

“…kind of charming, really,” Jane finished. “I mean the Addams Family is creepy, too, but we all wished secretly we lived next to them, ya know?”

“Jane, I want you out of my head.”

“No, you don’t, actually.”

With a sickening lurch in her stomach and a sudden shudder, Underworld realized the woman was right—she really didn’t want Crazy Jane gone—from her head or her life—but therein lie the trap that she could clearly see. It was one thing to want, but…

“It doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t, Jane,” Underworld said, hoping that reason could somehow prevail over Crazy Jane’s unbalanced notions. “The point is I don’t really like you. What you’re doing is trying to hook me on your presence. That isn’t the same. It would be better for us both if you stopped this now.”

“I can’t,” Crazy Jane said. “I really can’t. And I don’t want to. Whether you like me or not, Undie,  I’m kinda fond of you. I don’t have many women I can confide in and watch sappy movies with or get a pedi and mani with. Ya know, if I should start to develop a taste in those things. Thing is, Janus is a man. Men have limitations. So, in the end, you don’t really want me to stop, and I don’t want to stop, so it’ll keep on going, and we’ll be cool in the end.”

“That’s so…wrong…sick…something,” Underworld said. “You can’t force me to be your frie…”

“We’re in a lifestyle that’s already wrong, Undie,” Crazy Jane, and Underworld realized it was perhaps the most lucid and true thing she had ever heard the woman say. “You’ll fight it at first. You’ll try to stay away from me. You’ll make excuses to stay in your apartment. But eventually, you’ll just ‘bump into’ me one day soon, and I’m gonna oblige you by reaching out and making that connection again. Think of it as healthy female bonding. BFF kinda stuff. It’ll make it a lot easier and save us both a lot of time. Seeya, Undie!”

With that Crazy Jane hung up, and Underworld simply looked at her phone, then looked at her door, and shook her head. She didn’t have any real friends and hadn’t for a long time, and even if this wasn’t what she wanted, part of her found the idea pleasing. The most horrifying part of that thought process, though, was that she couldn’t know whether she needed a girlfriend and Crazy Jane was just the ticket, or if she was letting the woman’s addictive powers compromise her judgment and was just justifying the urge to give in.

Whether or not I do give in, I won’t go quietly, she thought. I won’t just hand myself over to an addiction, no matter how relatively benign it might be. I can’t let someone else call the shots for me. I have to make the decisions that affect my future.

Of course, she realized, decisions had already been made for her recently, most notably by Janus himself in dragging her into his organization to begin with—if that sonofabitch is behind this I’ll kill him, she thought—but she wasn’t about to let a wholly unbalanced transhuman woman at least 10 years her junior tell her what to do. Or even drive her to do it.

But as she found herself looking at the door again, Underworld wondered just how long it would be before she made the decision herself to go visit Crazy Jane or make a date to have coffee with her.

I’m looking over the edge of the abyss, she realized, and it already feels so good to give in to the urge to jump.

[ – To view the next chapter, click here – ]

The Gathering Storm, Part 18

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In her Allison Wonderland costume, but sans the mask and wig, Vanessa Santos landed a vicious kick at the midsection of the practice dummy, then a quick trio of hand strikes at the nose, throat and chest. She did a short backwards hop away from the dummy, quickly wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm, huffed so loudly it was almost a grunt, and then howled and launched a series of punches, elbow strikes and kicks at the dummy again.

She repeated her onslaught for several more minutes with a manic energy—having already been at it for nearly 20 minutes—until she began to wear down, her blows slowing and losing strength. Finally she launched one last weak spinning kick that barely grazed the dummy and sent her tumbling to the lightly padded floor.

As she struggled back into a sitting position, Allison looked down at the slick, slightly sparkly, light blue gloves with white cuffs that ran almost to her elbows, then down at the identically hued blue dress and white apron, panting and gasping alternately until the two actions finally began to mix into sobs. She put her face in her hands, and launched one more flailing kick from her place on the floor, missing the dummy entirely, dumping her on her back again and leading to a louder series of sobs as she righted herself.

A few minutes later, she raised her face from out of the puddles in her palms. The streaks on her face and the puffy eyelids were a legacy to her crying jag, but her eyes were dry now. Hard. Angry.

And fixed on the camera in the corner of the training room.

She extended her middle finger, advancing on the camera as she continued to flip it off. When she was as close as she could get to it, she mouthed the words “Fuck you” and exited the room. Her legs were unsteady, but there was still determination in the pace of her stride.

“Dramatic,” Fortunato said, his light brown face impassive as he stopped the video playback of the scene and set the remote control for the digital disc player on the top of his desk. “Sloppy at the end, but certainly fierce. I can only hope she won’t cry in battle.”

“She’s probably embarrassed enough that she forgot about the camera and cried where you could see it,” Jeremiah noted. “I don’t know that she’ll cry again within a 10-mile radius of you now. I can guarantee that if she wasn’t imagining that training dummy was you already, she sure will be from now on.”

“Oh, she clearly already was,” Fortunato answered, “and I’m sure next time she’ll be envisioning testicles on it and aiming quite a number of blows between the legs.”

Jeremiah’s grin bordered on the sardonic as he said, “I find it amazing that she was surprised you had been grooming her for possible duty fighting on the streets and such. All those muay Thai sessions, tai chi and aerobics that you insisted on in between the studying and honing of her transhuman talents…”

“People have an amazing capacity to go into self-denial,” Fortunato responded, “especially when they don’t like the idea of where things are heading. Besides, the story I told her that it was necessary for properly gauging and testing her powers—as well as keeping her in shape for testing—was plausible; partly true, even. And I was never certain when I hired her that I’d ever make use of her transhuman powers.”

Fortunato paused, then fixed his gaze on Jeremiah for several moments before he continued: “You know, you should probably have a bit more sympathy for her.”

“I’m supposed to be on your side, sir,” Jeremiah noted. “I don’t question you unless you need a Devil’s advocate and I don’t coddle people you’re trying to mold—not even in my thoughts. Besides, isn’t it a little ironic that you want me to have sympathy for her when you’re the one who blackmailed her into becoming a costumed transhuman?”

“Well, you both have a similar status in many ways. You both work for me and owe your livelihoods to me,” Fortunato pointed out. “There, but for the grace of God, go you,” he added, gesturing toward the monitor that had so recently played Vanessa’s martial arts workout.

“I’d never be in that position, though, so I don’t have sympathy,” Jeremiah said, shrugging.

“Do you think you’re beyond the reach of my machinations, Jeremiah?” Fortunato’s tone had a hint of playfulness, but also curiosity and intensity.

“No, sir. However, I do think that sending your executive assistant into battle against transhumans when he doesn’t have powers, hand-to-hand combat skills or weapons training would be counterproductive. It would take years to break in somebody that could understand what you need and when you need it half as well as I do.”

“This sudden sense of self-importance and irreplacability will likely factor into your next job review, Jeremiah.”

“Well, sir, it’s a good thing for me that I have nine or ten months before then for you to forget,” he replied. “But, honestly, I know I can be replaced—just as I know that my value lies in where I am at, and replacing me would be an incredible inconvenience for you. So, I have nothing in common with your new project, Allison Wonderland, and no reason to sympathize with her, either in that role or as Vanessa Santos.”

“Do you know that you can be a cold-blooded human at times, Jeremiah?”

“Isn’t that one of the many character traits you hired me for, sir?” he asked. “You need someone who can co-sign your cold-blooded moments and help you maximize them.”

He didn’t smile and neither did Fortunato. It wasn’t a joke and they both knew it; it was nothing more or less than the truth, plainly told.

After several minutes of silence, Jeremiah cleared his throat lightly and said, “So, how large of a team are you planning to create?”

Fortunato gave him a puzzled look. “A team for what? Is there a new IT rollout I’ve forgotten about, or a new drug that our pharmaceutical division needs to get through the FDA approvals?”

“I sincerely doubt you plan to send Allison Wonderland out as a solo avenger for your cousin’s murder,” Jeremiah said. “Also, you’ve been moving funds to some interesting parts of your corporate empire lately. If I couldn’t figure out the implications by now, it would probably be a sign I’ve outlasted my usefulness as an employee.”

Fortunato sighed. “It’s nothing personal, you understand. I would have needed to make you aware eventually. But I had been hoping to secure some support from the transhuman community—a few select individuals, anyway—before I started briefing you.”

“Like Query?”

“Yes, like Query,” Fortunato admitted, “though there are several others that are just as high on my list of potential recruits.”

“But none who’d so readily tell you to go screw yourself when you call them.”

“True. Besides, even when I start getting nibbles—Query excepted in all likelihood—it could all still fall apart.”

“Janus is responsible for the death of one of your family. There is no way you’d allow such a plan to fall apart. Still, team-building among transhumans is a tricky task, and this is no short-term plan you’re hatching.”

“I can’t think short-term on this,” Fortunato said. “It’s highly unlikely that even the most perfectly structured team could take Janus down quickly. There will be too many layers between us and him. Plus, I’ll need the support of the city and perhaps the state, which means I’ll have to include their needs, which means I won’t be able to focus full-time on my real enemy. And, frankly, even if I get lucky and do have a quick resolution to Janus, I have to think ahead. He’s setting a precedent in my city that in all likelihood means that the huge vacuum he leaves once he’s finished off would be filled by someone else—or multiple someones would make a mess of the city trying to. I need a good-sized team and one that has flexibility built into it to fill the ranks again as we lose members through…ummm…attrition.”

“Also a team with a good mix and balance of powers and capabilities,” Jeremiah noted.

“Naturally. Of course, now that you’ve deduced all this, you’ve put me in the position of needing to increase your workload several weeks earlier than I otherwise would have done.”

“Might as well add more work. I can sleep when I’m dead. I’d rather be working than dreaming anyway.”

“A pity we can’t simply eliminate sleep from the equation, eh?” Fortunato said. “I wonder, though, what it would do to a man never to dream again. I seem to recall that the military got some very bad results from long-term sleep deprivation experiments back in the ’60s or ’70s. I’ll have your assignment and project list to you tomorrow morning. Time for some team-building of the non-standard sort.”

* * *

“You’re now up to a total of 17 messages from Fortunato or his associates,” Carl noted midway through his evening meeting with Query. “Are you ready to start responding to them with anything but silence or some version of ‘fuck off’?”

“Do you think it would make him go away faster if I actually paid attention to him?”

“Uhhhhhh…no.”

“Then I think you have my answer,” Query noted. “I suppose it would be nice to know what he thinks is so important to keep calling, but won’t actually leave any info for me in the messages. Clearly, it’s no peril-and-jeopardy thing.”

“All that vaunted intuitive power you have in that brain, and can’t figure Fortunato out,” Carl teased.

“Who can?” Query said sourly. “Sadly, intuition, no matter how hyped up by mutated genes, doesn’t give me all the answers.”

“The problem is that you’re not really invested in finding out,” Carl pointed out. “You really are just trying to ignore him; not figure out what he wants. Because then you might be tempted to engage with him. Maybe he wants to put all that money to work for a fellow transhuman and respected peer and build you a fancy Question Cave.”

When Query didn’t respond, Carl looked up from his iPad Quinto. The transhuman hero was looking just off to the side of Carl’s face, suggesting he was deep in thought. Carl opened his mouth to speak, and Query lifted one finger to indicate he should be quiet.

After a minute or two, Query got up and started pacing slowly around the office. Carl thought he heard faint mumbling, and then clearer words came forth from the man’s mask—quiet but discernible and spoken in a rhythmic cadence.

“Not so gently; never incidentally. Is he Ritchie Rich or Remy Buxaplenty?”

“Huh?” Carl blurted, and Query stopped. Turned to face him. Considered him for a moment before answering.

“What?” Query said.

“You spaced out, and then you started rapping or something,” Carl said.

“I wasn’t spaced out; I was thinking. As for the rapping, I didn’t realize I was speaking out loud.”

“You rap?” Carl said. He looked like he was about to laugh.

“Maybe. I do a lot of things besides beat up on bad guys.”

“Rap? You know, you can’t…”

“…if you finish that as ‘…spell crap without rap’ I may be beating up more than bad guys in a moment. I think your secret enjoyment of Nickelback, Coldplay and Lady Gaga is questionable.”

For a moment, Carl was tempted to ask how Query knew about those guilty pleasures, then remembered who he was talking to. Even if the man wasn’t monitoring his online listening or music purchases, his hyped-up hearing could probably make out the music from the iPod headphones when Carl listened to music during some of their meetings.

“OK, OK. Truce,” Carl said. “But it was weird.”

“You don’t want to be in my head, Carl. Trust me. It’s a mess. Anyway, I sometimes think in verse, OK? It’s just a thing. But your smart-ass comment about funding me a Query Cave…”

“I said ‘Question Cave’ I think.”

“Not classy enough. Point is, you got me thinking about the bastard, as much as I was trying to avoid it, and you provided the trigger for me to start sorting things out. Not sure if I should kick you or thank you. I think he is looking to fund something big, but not a ‘Query Cave.’ He’s trying to get my buy-in on something, though. Maybe some sort of huge job he needs done. Maybe some kind of transhuman network or team. Maybe something else. Not sure yet. Question is how pure his motives are, whatever it is he’s planning. Whatever. I have to focus on Janus and Zoe Dawson right now, but I’ll set this to simmer on the back burner.”

“Rap singing and cooking. You’re quite the Renaissance hero, aren’t you?”

“Keep it up, Carl, and I’ll make you listen to a marathon of Ice T, Tupac, 50 Cent and Kanye West while I give you paper cuts and drip lemon juice on them.”

* * *

An explosion of flavors on her tongue; a symphony of scents and tastes to dazzle her senses. Zoe swallowed slowly to savor the pricey, gourmet fare, holding tight to every second of anything pleasurable to take her mind off her dinner companion and what that companion symbolized and portended.

“So nice to see you truly enjoy a meal with me for once,” Underworld said. Tonight, the woman was dressed in a somewhat matronly disguise, adding an extra 10 or 15 years to her actual age but barely putting a dent in her sex appeal—their waiter had been subtly flirting with the woman since they had arrived. “After all, I’ve been taking you to ever fancier places; it’s getting expensive to woo you to our little operation.”

“Crime doesn’t pay enough to buy a few nice meals?” Zoe said, her tones sweet but the rhythm of her words hinting at disdain. “I see it’s also no longer just Janus’ operation—you’re ‘all in’ now, are you?”

Underworld brushed off the attempt to bait her, waving her hand in the air as if to literally shoo away Zoe’s words. “Zoe, I appreciate your strength of character; I really do. And while I hate to put a damper on your appetite by bringing up business, since you finally seem to be eating a healthy amount in one of our little dinner meetings, I need to tell you that Janus is giving you room only until after your graduation. Once you hand in that rental gown, though, all bets are off. From that moment on, you’re fair game, and if you don’t sign on, you can expect to be drafted or start running.”

“I’ll let you know,” Zoe said noncommittally, spearing a piece of tender filet mignon and setting it on her tongue to mix with the earlier flavors of mushroom risotto and herb-butter-broiled lobster tail. “It’s nice to have a deadline in mind. That helps me stretch things out just a little and get to feel all pampered and loved and special with these recruitment meals.”

She tried to keep her tone light, as if none of this bothered her, but she could see in Underworld’s smile and eyes that the other woman saw through her charade. Zoe’s bluster was clearly a sham to Underworld, and the villain seemed to enjoy the cat-and-mouse game a bit too much for Zoe’s tastes.

Another glass of wine followed dinner, and then dessert after that. Then more banter and thinly veiled threats of potential abduction and Janus’ potential ire if Zoe hemmed and hawed too much for too long. Zoe playing hard-to-get and Underworld deftly mixing the roles of recruiter and intimidator.

When she could finally leave, Zoe almost sighed openly with relief. When she was far from the restaurant, alone and sure she couldn’t be seen, she pulled out the pre-paid cell phone she had bought for no other reason than to contact Query to begin with, and she started typing a message to him—or whomever handled his calls, emails and texts.

The deadline that Underworld had given her sounded fishy. It felt like a trap. It seemed all too likely it was a way to lull her into a sense of complacency so someone could abduct her sometime between now and graduation—and probably closer to “now.”

She conveyed that in her message to Query as well as she could in typed words, put the phone back in her purse, and rushed to find the nearest taxi so she could get out of the open and back home—someplace she could at least have some shadow of a sense of security.

* * *

The text from Zoe was a welcome thing for Query—it made him look like just another electronic communications-obsessed pedestrian as he read it while trailing Zoe’s dinner companion on foot. He was able to scan the message while he walked, feeling sympathy for the young woman even as he tasted the potential for a chance to get a shot at Janus or one of his cronies soon.

His assessment of the situation was much like Zoe’s own, though he didn’t want to assume too much. Janus had already proven to be unpredictable, and perhaps calculatedly so. He might snatch her up in a matter of hours or days, but he might also wait for months after her graduation just to ensure she’d be unwary when he sent someone after her.

The woman who had bought Zoe dinner tonight was walking calmly. No rush. A few times, she even stopped to check out dresses in the front windows of expensive boutique shops, making Query have to readjust and look natural without getting too close or calling attention to himself—that self being a slightly overweight, no-longer-middle-aged-but-not-quite-elderly Middle Eastern man tonight.

Query was certain that this woman was the same one who had been working to recruit Zoe at every other meal he’d spied on—she wore a different wig each time and altered her appearance in other, more sophisticated ways, but her height and build had never once changed, and that was enough for Query to confirm it was the same woman each time. According to Zoe, the woman was Underworld, and based on the most recent data Query had on the villain, the body type and size matched close enough.

For Janus to have such a well-connected and competent transhuman criminal like Underworld directly recruiting Zoe made him uncomfortable. What was it that Janus knew or suspected about Zoe and her powers that made her so valuable to him thsat he would do that? Such complex and befuddling machinations by Janus were made all the more uncomfortable by the increasing awareness that Fortunato was plotting something himself.

Sure, Fortunato is one of the white hats, but he’s unsavory and borderline criminal in a few ways, and an asshole in most ways, Query thought. To some degree, the plotting of a villain makes me less uncomfortable, because I can simply go after that person. But what to do when someone who’s supposedly my peer and potential ally is someone I don’t trust?

Query pursued Underworld on foot for another 15 minutes before finally losing her in a crowd and finding himself unable to pick up her trail again without looking conspicuous and possibly drawing the attention of any watchers that might be looking out for her on Janus’ behalf.

It had been the same with the other four stake-outs, too, when he’d followed her afterward. Underworld never took the same route, and almost never even headed in the same compass direction each time, leaving him baffled as to where her ultimate destination lay. And always, there came a point at which she managed to lose him. It wasn’t unexpected, but the caution she showed suggested that Janus was keeping security as a top priority. Tracking his operation down and nailing him was going to be very challenging indeed.

Query had considered putting a tracking device on Underworld somehow, but with this much in the way of caution and security protocols, no doubt at some point before she got near Janus, someone would search her physically and electronically. If a device was found, Query would have tipped his hand and would probably lose his chance to draw out Janus.

He doesn’t leave me a single useful clue to which I can apply my much-vaunted intution, Query grumbled mentally. And neither does Underworld. In other words, they’re acting just like I do to protect myself.

A part of him reveled in that. A challenge. Something to put him through his paces.

Query hailed a cab, and set out to re-acquire Zoe. Tonight was probably the last time he could risk wasting time trying to track Underworld without putting Zoe at undue risk. From now on, he would have to stay close to the young woman—but not too close.

The game is afoot, mine enemies, Query thought. Even if you’ve eluded me tonight, eventually you’ll slip up. Or I will. Either way, we’re going to have some resolution eventually. Bet on it.

[ – To view the next chapter, click here – ]

The Gathering Storm, Part 17

[ – To view a list of all current chapters, click here – ]

Entering Janus’ office, she moved with slow, purposeful steps, like a ballet dancer building up toward some grand maneuver—then she abruptly stopped 12 feet away from the imposing mahogany desk, where Janus sat and Underworld and Crazy Jane stood nearby. Standing with straight and perfect posture, arms loosely at her side, her ankles crossed, Tooth Fairy kept her head slightly bowed as she regarded the trio before her.

Underworld had no illusions, though. There was nothing of subservience or deference in the angle of Tooth Fairy’s head. Her eyes still regarded them directly from just under the brows of her fractionally inclined visage. She was intent on them, and there was a coldness in her gaze. Calculation in it, Underworld decided. For all the oddness of Tooth Fairy’s pose, it was clear she was poised for action. A casual observer might think she was  standing at ease. Underworld knew she was holding everything inside, a concentrated force. She was like a living bomb, Underworld concluded, and wondered what might be the trigger that would set her off in this very room.

I wonder about Crazy Jane’s ability to discern all of this, Underworld thought, but I doubt any of my observations would be any surprise to Janus. With her thought of Crazy Jane’s perceptions—or perhaps lack thereof—Underworld realized the woman was less than a foot away from her. Damn, I must be distracted these days to let that freak get so close to me. Nothing to do now but endure it until Tooth Fairy is gone, lest we look like anything less than a unified group.

Underworld found herself immensely glad they were meeting in a dummy location and not the actual headquarters building—Tooth Fairy was someone she felt could be useful. Not someone she felt could be trusted.

“So. I’m here,” Tooth Fairy said, very slowly. “You invited me. I accepted. I’m listening. Make it worth the trouble of my visit.”

As she was speaking, the tone of her words gradually morphed from soft and motherly to something both sensual and grating. Her mouth had also grown slowly into a teeth-baring feral grin, giving Janus, Underworld and Crazy Jane a chance to watch her teeth go from middle-class, soccer-mom standard to a set of 30 or 40 demonic incisors. All of it so at odds with the white body suit and its iridescent accents, silky lavender sash belt and fuchsia ballet slippers—not to mention the vaguely rainbow-hued fairy wings attached to the back of the costume. Of course, the ornate necklace made of teeth and finger bones matched her newly altered dentition all too well, Underworld considered.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for so long,” Crazy Jane gushed before Janus could say anything in response to Tooth Fairy’s arrival and opening statement. “I’m so glad you took Janus’ invitation. Welcome to our happy family.” She stepped toward Tooth Fairy, hand outstretched to offer a shake.

With sinuous grace, Tooth Fairy’s head turned slightly toward Crazy Jane even as she shifted her weight slightly backward on her feet. Underworld noted how the faux wings on Tooth Fairy’s back twitched ever so slightly as muscles tensed. She felt a sudden and odd sense of protectiveness toward Crazy Jane that surprised her, but ultimately she made no move to intervene.

You’ve made your bed, Jane…

“Go back to where you were standing,” Tooth Fairy said in a near-snarl, and Crazy Jane paused, fidgeted a bit, and then stepped back, giggling a little—Underworld thought she detected a bit of hurt in Crazy Jane’s gaze, but also sensed a bit of satisfaction there, as if she had just completed a small task. Underworld let her eyes quickly flit toward Janus’ own and what she saw there confirmed her suspicion that Jane’s exuberance had been at least partly planned.

“My personal space is really big,” Tooth Fairy continued, “and you don’t want to violate it. I’m picky who I invite in. Also, speaking of violations, if I feel even the barest tickle of anything in my brain or body that doesn’t feel natural, you die first Janus—you know, just in case you or any of your crew is a Psi or Feral. Also, if anyone touches me physically or tries to, they’ll pay in flesh. One of your lackeys already discovered that when they let me past reception.”

Behind a face mask that was equal parts angel and demon, with an intricate tiara-like attachment that depicted a half-halo on one side gently morphing into a single horn on the other side, Janus’ eyes never blinked or registered any emotional reaction to Tooth Fairy’s words. “I thought I vaguely heard a scream,” he said without notable inflection. “Did you leave anything my medical team can salvage so that he’ll still be a useful employee?”

“That depends, Janus,” Tooth Fairy said. “Do you require your workers to have noses? And such a nice, big, strong Roman nose it was. Yummy.”

“Well, I don’t see any blood spatters,” Janus said, not missing a beat, a faint note of admiration creeping into his voice. “You certainly did manage to clean up very nicely and quickly.”

“I’m too quick to leave messes on my finery,” Tooth Fairy said. “And I lick my lips after every meal.”

“I do so love fastidiousness,” Janus said, with a slight tone of impatience or perhaps exasperation, “but while I could discuss violently expressed and socially unacceptable expressions of obsessive-compulsive disorder all day long—as well as fashion and finance…well, actually, I guess I will be discussing that last item, won’t I? After all, I did invite you here to extend an offer of employment.”

Tooth Fairy slowly slid her tongue across her lips in consideration, then smiled—her teeth more or less back to normal human shape. “I kinda like being my own boss; no thanks. I don’t take direction well. Or orders. Or criticism. Or job reviews. And I already have a great set of insurance and retirement plans, all funded through self-employment.”

“There are no ‘teeth’ in teamwork, so we weren’t really thinking you’d be all that interested in group activities,” Underworld interjected. “We had in mind something more along the lines of being an independent contractor. You know, consulting, troubleshooting, miscellaneous wetwork.”

Tooth Fairy said nothing, but frowned neutrally in contemplation for a while, one toe tapping nervously. Underworld wondered if the woman had issues with being indoors—perhaps a form of claustrophobia. She mentally filed away the information and waited in silence.

“How much discretion would I get to exercise?” Tooth Fairy finally asked.

“I’d be giving you most of your assignments, and I have better things to do than micromanage…” Underworld began.

“…do the jobs you’re given and don’t draw attention to us unless we want you to, and I don’t care how much collateral recreational mayhem you cause,” Janus interrupted.

“Besides, if we want to sic you on someone, it’s because of your champion-level creeptasticness,” Underworld said, noting mentally that Crazy Jane had moved a few inches closer to her while the exchange with Tooth Fairy had been going on. She mentally gritted her teeth and moved an inch or two away from the woman with as much casualness as she could muster.

“I’m not sure how to feel about that characterization,” Tooth Fairy said archly.

“Do you like striking freakish terror into the hearts of most everyone you encounter?” Underworld asked, welcome to have something to take her attention away from the nearness of Crazy Jane.

“But of course.”

“Then take it as a recognition of how good you are at what you do,” Underworld said, “and keep your teeth away from my extremities.”

“There won’t be any Janus-signal, you promise?” Tooth Fairy said, her gaze and voice hard. “No asking me to partner up with one of your specialists or assembling me to some big brawl or to bail all of you out of a jam with a bunch of do-gooders?”

“Cross my heart and hope to gain 40 pounds all in my hips and thighs if I’m lying,” Underworld said.

“Well, that’s more serious than ‘hope to die’ among a couple body-conscious ladies like ourselves, right?” Tooth Fairy said with a exceedingly wide and utterly human-toothed grin, which almost unnerved Underworld more than the fangs had. “I’m in. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say—of a few pounds if flesh and bones are involved.”

* * *

June. Solstice hated it with a passion. Nothing against the month itself, or the coming of summer. She liked being able to hit the beaches and parks like anyone else and frolic among freshly released college students and work-skipping young professionals. Rather, she hated what it represented among her transhuman peers.

The hotter it got, the more the white hats slacked off. And it wasn’t just the lure of summertime festivals and other recreation that pulled them away from the crime-fighting. It was the damn costumes. So many of them were attired in a manner that was completely at odds with conducting a heavily physical, often combat-oriented avocation under very hot and sometimes humid conditions. Some had summer outfits but many others simply toned down their patrols and stopped regularly listening in to public safety communications until the arrival of autumn.

It wasn’t like she’d be alone in the streets fighting the bad guys, but crime always went up in the summer—the more lackadaisical attitudes of many heroes being just one factor—and more burden would be on her, since she could actually use her powers to keep cool.

Sometimes I think I should just stop caring and ramp down my activities in the summer, too, she complained silently.

But she wouldn’t. She’d keep cleaning up messes.

Including her own now—the one Query had dumped in her lap, damn him. But then again, he was right. She’d made a huge mess and put a lot of women in danger with her recent actions. No matter than she couldn’t have predicted old-school, uber-psycho gangster Marty the Hun would react this way. He wouldn’t be doing it at all if she had done her job right.

She pulled out her smart phone, checked her notepad app to see where her next stop was, and got down to some more investigating.

* * *

Speaking through a half-chewed bite of pizza, Carl Beacham said to Query, “Sure you don’t want a piece?”

“We have these meetings regularly, Carl, and I’m happy to order out for pizza or Chinese or whatever on my tab, but you should know by now that whatever’s left, I’m gonna eat it after you’re long gone.”

“You’d be less grumpy if you had a little cheese and pepperoni in you,” Carl insisted, picking up a fresh slice and dangling it like bait.

“I think pizza’s great, Carl, though I prefer bacon or sausage to the pepperoni, and I don’t share your disdain for mushrooms,” Query said through the near-featurless black mask, the red question mark over his mouth never moving as he spoke. “But I’m not showing you any part of my face, even from lips down—no matter how handsome my mouth may be.”

Carl coughed, paused then took a long swig of his Coke. “You do not want to know where my mind just went with that mouth comment, Query.”

“I’ve known you long enough to guess, Carl.”

Setting down his drink and the slice of pizza, Carl cleared his throat and looked at the agenda on his the screen of his iPad Quinto. “Well, that brings us to the end of things, unless you have anyone to add to the discovery list.”

“Oh, but I do. I know it’s been a while, but you’re gonna love this: I have a two-fer for you today. I have the identities of Coldraven and Good War.”

“Jesus, Query,” Carl said, and then whistled sharply. “You know, if you get killed fighting the good fight, I’m going to make a fortune off this list, even if I don’t do anything but demand that everyone on it pay me $50 a month to never reveal who they are publicly.”

“Yeah, that’ll be good for about a year at most until one of them kills you, Carl. Besides, with these two, I’m going to hold my knowledge over both of their heads soon to secure a favor owed from both of them—leave the blackmail to the professionals, Carl. Anyway, the cool thing is that I figured out both their identities almost the same way. I have to admit, Coldraven was the toughest of the two. I never could understand her name. There’s nothing cold-oriented about her powers and nothing avian about them or about her costume, either. Drove me nuts. Then it occurred to me maybe her codename was related to her real name, and then it only took a few days once that happened. My intuitive powers went into high gear.”

“What? Her name is Winter Byrd—her parents are hippies?” Carl mumbled through another bite of pizza.

“Not a bad guess, but it was nothing that obvious, which is why it took a few days. But I did do some name searches with some homemade data filters and came up with several possibilities. One of them wasn’t far off your snarky guess: Autumn Hawke. But no, actually it turns out to be a woman named Christmas Poe.”

“OK, I get the Christmas equals cold thing, but what’s her last name got to do…ohhhhh. Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The Raven.’ Gotcha.”

“Yup,” Query said. “After that success, I tried a similar strategy on some other names that had always stumped me as far as their origins. And that’s how I got Good War’s name.”

“No much of a stumper there. He’s a good American boy—a real patriot. Or a fan of Captain America and Sgt. Fury both with the red, white and blue infantryman theme going.”

“Yeah, but even though he’s been known for going after domestic terrorists and such, he’s also gone after dirty military types and crooked cops pretty often,” Query noted. “A dyed-in-the-wool ‘America rocks’ type probably wouldn’t go after guys in uniform, I figured. But then I came across a guy who’s related to an FBI agent—who probably gives Good War the tips on most of his targets, by the way—whose name is Bill Wilcox Jr.”

“OK. Not getting that one at all, Query.”

“William Wilcox II—WWII,” Query said. “That was actually his nickname in college.”

“Still not getting it.”

“Guess you didn’t do well in American History in school then, Carl. World War II—sometimes called ‘The Good War’.”

“War…Huh! Yeah!…What is it good for?…Absolutely nothin’…say it again!” Carl belted out, singing the song wildly out of tune. “I always did better in music class than history. By the way, Bruce Springsteen’s version of ‘War’ is the only one worth listening to. That’s my opinion anyway, about warfare and modern rock. But it does explain why Good War’s costume is so 1940s military-looking—aside from the bright Captain America colors.”

“Yeah, play it cool, Carl. You know you’re impressed with me. Now get the hell out of here. I’m sure Patsy would like to be cuddled while the two of you watch some episodes of ‘Big Love’ or ‘Dexter’ or something, and I’d like to get to finishing what’s left of that pizza.”

* * *

Returning the the Guardian Corps headquarters, Cole was sweaty and sore, bruised and feeling the sting of a cut on his lip that was just barely beginning to scab over—and he was feeling more alive than in a long time. He’d just completed his first real patrol. Not simply a babysitting mission like before to show him the procedures and get him used to things—the one that had unexpectedly turned into a firefight that landed him on Desperado’s bad side.

This had been a full-fledged patrol. Cole had been a junior member of the team, but treated like a peer. Even though in some ways it had been a less harrowing and less exciting patrol than his previous one, it meant more to him.

He felt good, having been in two fights tonight with criminals, but without the madness of his first encounter. It felt different in qualitative way. He was a member of the Corps now. He even had a codename other than Puppy now—Quantum. But something nagged at him.

Why?

Desperado had been so dead-set against letting Cole be a part of things mere days ago, and the man didn’t seem like the type to forget a grudge. And yet just last night, he had green-lighted Cole to go on patrols and have free run of the Guardian Corps buildings. He had told Sweet Talker that Cole wasn’t her responsibility anymore. None of that made sense, as there was nothing Cole could think of that he had done to justify Desperado changing his tune.

Had it all been a test just to see if I would take his shit? Cole thought, a shadow of doubt crossing his mind even as his vision blurred for a split-second like a dirty smear across his eyes. Perhaps, but the likelihood of that seems slim. Still, he didn’t feel like he should dwell on it much or complain. It had been a good night of fighting the good fight.

Moreover, he had finally gotten a taste of his full powers in a conflict. He’d grown increasingly comfortable with his Warpsmith powers already, but then again, he’d been toying with those for years. What hadn’t been clear was how to use his other powers—either Ecto or telekinetic Psi powers; he’d never been able to figure it out. Desperado’s approach to training wasn’t likely to have ever helped Cole sort out the confusion and gain insight, since it tended to involve a lot of yelling and screaming to “get it right” and “do it now.”

But Sweet Talker and her all-female crew—who seemed to be united around the idea of being a small but strong front against Desperado’s assholery—had worked with Ectos before, and took Cole under their wings. PrinSass in particular had a knack for explaining things, and now Cole finally knew for sure he was an Ecto as well as a Warpsmith, and finally started tapping his powers.

His control was still awful, though. In the patrol tonight, his quasi-matter constructs were barely in existence long enough to give enemies a good, hard slap. But it was progress.

As he wandered among the other Corps members, he caught snatches of conversation about another patrol that was ambushed tonight, and that soured his mood a bit. From what he heard of the accounts, the ambush had been so thorough that it meant the attackers probably had acquired some inside information. One person in the patrol was dead, another was in critical condition and the third was going to be sporting a couple casts for the next few weeks until Asclepius could fit him in between more critical work.

Cole winced as a slight sharp pain lanced his brow briefly, and another dirty smear crossed his vision and vanished. It reminded him a little of the sensory distortion his Warpsmith powers sometimes produced, but this time more focused on visual alterations.

Not a total buzzkill, Cole thought, but definitely a sign I should probably find a cot and take a quick nap, just in case there’s any more action tonight I can be a part of.

* * *

“Bingo, bango, yatzhee and eureka!” Mad Dash exclaimed. “I’m here, Query. What’s zapping, my man in black?”

Query was leaning against the wall of a building in the secluded back parking lot he often used for meeting with other transhumans at night, his arms crossed. “Thought we might talk about girls, Dash. You know, dating? Something I never thought I’d see you doing so publicly.”

“Uh…I didn’t know you cared enough to send Hallmark?” Mad Dash said. “I kind of figured you for straight-man all the way, Q. You aren’t feeling zoned out, are you? You weren’t…”

“No, Dash,” Query said patiently, accustomed as he was to the Speedster’s sometimes chaotic and rapid-fire stream of consciousness. “I don’t feel left out. I did not have designs on dating you myself. If my schedule ever allows for dating, it will be a woman. I just wanted to discuss the wisdom, or lack thereof, of dating Ladykiller.”

“Um…not reading you clearly on this frequency, Querio. Last I checked my gal-pal was a lot more badger-ish than killer-ish,” Mad Dash said with a huge smile.

“Uh huh. Look, Dash, I know not everyone got the memo on what Ladykiller looks like in costume, because I didn’t give that memo to everyone, and those couple times she was with you in her normal outfit, those folks weren’t around, didn’t notice or just didn’t give a shit,” Query said, then pointed the first two fingers of his right hand to where his eyes where, even if they couldn’t be seen through his black mask. “I pay attention. I keep tabs on things, even if I might be a few days late in catching up on the intel my eyes gather all over the place.”

“Soooooo…you’re saying…that you methinks…that…”

“You don’t lie all that well, Dash.”

“C’mon, Query,” Mad Dash said, a tiny whine in his voice. “You’re not going to bust my gal, are ya?”

“No, Dash, I’m not going to bust her—I’ve got no particular reason to. Which isn’t the same as saying I might not have to take her down someday. But that ain’t my point. My concern is that someone I like is getting personal—and I’m guessing naked and vulnerable—with someone known for wounding, crippling and gutting men. Men almost exclusively. Sometimes on a nightly basis. Many nights more than one guy.”

“And this has whatnot to do with me me meep?”

Query sighed heavily—heavier than he would have in an un-costumed situation, but he knew Mad Dash wouldn’t be able to see his exasperated expression. “Dash, you still have testicles, right? She didn’t claw them off, right?”

“She’s tickled them a little bit with her…”

“Too much info, Dash. Too much. The question was rhetorical.”

“OK, OK. I getcha Q-man. She hurts guys and offs guy. I’m a guy. But she offs total asshole abusive guys. I’m harmless to the average gal unless she’s robbing a bank or trying to kill someone or something.”

“How much do you know about her, Dash? I mean, really know? Do you have any clue what might set her off? What if being late to a date or having lipstick on your collar is all it takes? It’s not like I know a whole lot about her, either. I’ve got some video of her in action, but admittedly even I haven’t tracked her to her lair, though I suppose that should be a priority now…”

“Like hell, goddammit!” Mad Dash blurted, and Query stiffened a bit, startled at the sudden shift in temperament and tone of his friend’s voice. “I’m not a little boy.” Mad Dash paused, his face confused at his own outburst and the angry clarity of his thoughts. “Leave her alone,” he said more quietly. “If you don’t have a reason to need to bust her, leave her be. Leave her secrets alone. I think she’s got some bad ones. And by bad I mean they were bad things that happened to her. Let us do our thing, however long she’s willing to stay with my crazy self.”

“Dash, I…” Query began, then paused for a few moments. “Sorry. I’m so hyped up on keeping tabs and watching out for the few people I care about. It’s easy to forget sometimes you’re not immature. Just…disjointed. Scattered. But even with that…Dash, I don’t know that your judgment is sound given your general state of mind—this sudden splash of cold and lucid water notwithstanding.”

“What guy’s brain is ever screwed in all the way when he’s getting nookie, Q-cue-cue-dee-oh?” Mad Dash said, his normal demeanor and soft voice back in the forefront. “My road is so straight-and-narrowish most days I guess some sinkholes and speedbumps and dead skunks along the way are a nice change. Don’t tell her I said that. She might not get the romantic themes all squirreled away in that biblioteca of amore.”

“All right, Dash, I’ll try not to worry that a violence-prone woman with clawed gauntlets is dating one of the few people I consider a friend. I won’t tell anyone Honey Badger is really Ladykiller. But don’t be surprised if I keep my eyes on the two of you—I’ll avoid peeking in on any intimate moments. Scout’s honor.”

“Well, if you do record anything like that by accident, and it’s all hot like Papa Bear’s porridge or hot sauce in an eyeball, let me know. Maybe we can sell copies and split the cash-bar. All right, dude, are we all done here? I actually do have a date with the cute mammalian predator in query-dom.”

“Off with you, Dash. Be smart. Use protection. Like a titanium sheath on your dick, maybe.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Mad Dash teased before racing away.

A few moments later, Query said, “You can come out now, Epitaph. Sorry to keep you waiting. I guess I don’t have to worry about you sharing all that—it’s not like there are adequate death or remembrance-oriented quotes in literature and movies for you to use to tell people that Dash is dating a potential psycho-killer. ”

Stepping out from behind a dumpster, Epitaph shrugged. “Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain,” he said, looking in the direction Mad Dash had run.

“Yeah, nothing like bought experience. I agree. Dash will learn—and maybe he’ll prove us both wrong about Ladykiller.”

“There are stars whose light only reaches the earth long after they have fallen apart. There are people whose remembrance gives light in this world, long after they have passed away. This light shines in our darkest nights on the road we must follow.”

“Dash is one of a kind. No doubt about it. Maybe that’s why I worry about him. This crazy transhuman world we live in would be a lot less nice without him. But enough of that. What do you have for me?”

Epitaph reached under the large gravestone fragment over his chest and pulled out a manila envelope, handing it to Query, who pulled out several computer printouts from inside. After perusing them, his head snapped upward and his body language suggested he was giving Epitaph a glare or hard stare.

“Ep, I’ve told you time and again to stop bringing me a printout of Sweet Talker’s summary. She’s fine where she is. I don’t want to pull her out of the Guardian Corps. No matter what you think about how put-upon she is there, her presence in the organization is just about the only thing that moderates Desperado’s dickheadishness properly, in my mind. Any use I could put her to or anyone else I could direct her toward would squander her value.”

“Youth lives on hope, old age on remembrance,” Epitaph said.

“Well, you just keep on with the ‘hope springs eternal’ thing, Ep,” Query said with a snide tone. He figured he was one of the few—perhaps the only person—who could almost always get Epitaph’s meaning or most of it; doubtless, he figured, his transhuman intuitive powers were almost like a translator program for that, especially after the first few months of working with Epitaph and getting a read on his personality. “If Sweet Talker needs to leave, she’ll leave. She’s smart and knows what she needs. Your job is to bring to my attention people with potential who might not realize they have better options than the Guardian Corps.”

“I desire to leave to the men that come after me a remembrance of me in good works.”

“OK,” Query said, “your work is otherwise solid week in and week out, aside from that annoying ‘oversight’ you keep making with Sweet Talker. All right. The other two, then. This Wayne Henderson kid. He’s been with the Corps for two months and still hasn’t taken on any kind of codename? No costume of any sort?”

“Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men,” Epitaph noted.

“You’re probably right, based on the historical notes in his file here,” Query responded. “Orphaned. Abused. Abandoned. He’s either looking for an end to his life through working with the Corps or he doesn’t think he has any options or anyone else who would give a shit about him. But he doesn’t really seem to embrace the whole transhuman thing. I’ll think it over and see if there are some better options I can send his way or have you pass along to him. Okaaaaay…Cole Alderman. Going by the name Quantum. Still in street clothes, though, but working on a costume. Newbie. Trouble with Desperado.”

“Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.”

Query looked at him. “You think Desperado is playing him somehow? Hmmm. Cole is green, but fairly competent for a newbie. Still learning his powers. Seems committed to the heroing thing. Not kissing Desperado’s ass or looking for approval. All right, I see two things here. One is that he could do better than the Guardian Corps, but teams aren’t all that common and I’m not sure anyone who’s looking for a sidekick, apprentice or intern right now are people I’d want to toss Cole to. Second thing is that Desperado, as much of a douchebag as he is, wouldn’t try to get someone killed whom he didn’t like, which makes me think there’s something going on I shouldn’t fuck with here.”

Epitaph raised an eyebrow, scowling.

“Not right now, anyway. Keep me informed, Epitaph. Cole has potential, and I’d like to see him in a better place. But I don’t think this is the moment to pull him out. Besides, like I said, I don’t have anywhere to place him or anyone to refer him to,” Query responded, and handed Epitaph a small envelope filled with cash. “Another clandestine meeting, another payday. Thanks, Epitaph. Do me a favor and have your dinner at the Caped Cuisiner tonight. Make it a really leisurely one. Dash and ‘Honey Badger’ tend to have their dates there, and I’m 90% certain tonight will be one of those nights. I’d like some eyes on them. It’ll mean a bonus next week, and I’ll reimburse you for the tab you’ll run up. Just bring the receipt.”

Epitaph nodded, gave Query a quick military salute, and sauntered off, the two gravestone pieces over his chest and back swaying slightly—his feet hovering just a fraction of an inch off the ground as he walked.

Then Query was off to disappear into the night, and keep watch on Zoe Dawson. She’d probably be his focus until at least mid-June, since UConn’s New Judah campus had an entirely different schedule than the other University of Connecticut campuses, which had all held graduation in May. He’d never understand why the campus wasn’t just spun off as an entirely separate state university or simply privatized—juggling curricula with one campus on the quarter system and the rest on the semester system had to be a nightmare. In any case, whatever happened to Zoe, if anything, was likely to be anytime between now and commencement. Given Janus’ usual impatience with people who disobeyed or show disinterest in him, probably closer to now than to graduation.

Welcome to the real world, Zoe, Query thought, though certainly not the version you were hoping for.

* * *

The best thing about working with Janus, Underworld had recently decided, was the commissary in the building he had purchased for the criminal enterprise that he and she were more or less jointly running. The building held many advantages, not the least of which were spacious living accommodations and many forms of secret egress and ingress so that all key members of the organization—from Janus’ small army of IT geeks to the transhuman operatives to the top-ranking individuals like herself and Janus—could live and work in comfort and with almost no fear of being discovered or tracked by any enemies. Between multiple layers of security measures, threats of the worst kinds of torture for those who broke even the slightest security rule, and the fact the building offered enough amenities that most staff who knew about the criminal side of things didn’t have to leave very often, they were as safe as a group of criminals could be. Janus also had a number of other legitimate businesses in the building, all of which he or Underworld owned and controlled either directly or through proxies, and that also helped hide them and what they were doing that lay outside the bounds of the law.

But while all that was nice, oh, that commissary…

Even the most entry-level lackey in the criminal side of the organization gets to eat there free, and Janus’ insistence on calling it a commissary does it absolutely no justice, Underworld thought. From comfort foods to gourmet fare, everything is the best quality—a testament to his commitment to hedonism in all its forms. The entire culinary operation takes up an entire floor and the cafe is the best part, giving me a constant flow of cappuccinos, Turkish coffees and pastries to go with them. Thank God there’s also a gym in this place. 

This morning had been a particular joy for her, as she reveled in the lovely décor of the cafe and its European vibe, with an espresso drink and a pair of the truffle candies that had recently started shipping in from some European chocolatier. Sheer culinary ecstasy.

Until Crazy Jane arrived.

When she heard the giggle and looked up to see Jane entering the room, Underworld’s belly did a weird flip-and-toss. Nervous flutters. She sighed heavily, and ducked her head into the book she was reading.

Please sit at the other end of the cafe, she had thought at the time with desperate intensity. Please sit at the other end of the cafe. Please sit…

“Watcha doin’ Underworld?” Crazy Jane said in a voice dripping with metaphorical honey—almost manically exuberant, which would make sense given the psychotic stew Janus had set to simmering inside her head. The woman sat down across the small table from Underworld, the chin of her tattoo-covered face propped up on the heels of both hands as her elbows pinned down the paperwork that Underworld had brought along with her. Her eyes were wide and eager, glistening with expectation, as if Underworld were doing the most exciting thing in the world.

“Just waking up, reading and getting ready to look over some files—the ones your elbows are holding down,” Underworld said, feeling impatient to get rid of the woman but speaking as casually as possible. “Nothing earth-shattering. Nothing you’d be interested in.”

Crazy Jane proved her wrong by peppering her with questions for some 10 minutes. Every one of them answerable by a simple, short response—and every one of Underworld’s quick answers rewarded with some new question that probed for more detail on what was already banal. Underworld realized she hadn’t had to deal with a questioning like this since the time she had watched her five-year-old niece for several days.

I think the interrogations I’ve suffered at the hands of police, the FBI and military authorities would be preferable, Underworld mourned in her head, hoping without success that each answer she gave would be the one to get Crazy Jane to stop talking and move on. She wasn’t even sure why she was putting herself through this. Soon, if she doesn’t leave, she thought, I’m going to just have to snatch everything up and head back to my office instead to get some space from this crazy bitch.

And yet, despite the fact it hadn’t worked so far, she kept trying to close things off with a response that she figured was so final and iron-clad that Jane couldn’t possibly have a follow-up. She proved to be wrong three more times then, finally, Crazy Jane said, “Well, it’s been great, Undie. See ya later.”

“Don’t ever call me that…” Underworld began after a few moments of stunned silence, but Jane had already skipped out the door of the cafe to enter the main commissary area. For a brief, exasperating moment, Underworld desperately wished the woman had stuck around for a few choice words. Undie indeed. Bitch.

She almost went to chase Crazy Jane down, then mentally kicked herself, put her ass back onto the bistro chair and downed the rest of her drink, then motioned for the barista to come over with another.

Two more times during that same day, Underworld ran into Crazy Jane accidentally and got caught up in a circular, pointless conversation in which she didn’t want to be engaged. Every time the nervous fluttering in her belly when she saw the woman and the fruitless attempts to disengage from her once they enged up locked in conversation.

At least the other two times were blessedly brief compared to the cafe encounter, Underworld thought when she finally headed to her apartment for the night, almost sprinting there to avoid another unintended run-in with Crazy Jane. I may have to leave this organization just for my piece of mind if this keeps happening. I know too much about her now to want to be anywhere near for long—or so frequently.

Then she rediscovered her resolve by the time she got into bed, realizing that she’d never let anyone get in the way of her success before, psychotic or otherwise, and she wasn’t going to start now. They had to work in the same building together; there was no way around seeing her. At least Crazy Jane wasn’t going to show up in her bedroom, Underworld consoled herself silently.

And then after she finally dozed off, Underworld spent half her dreaming hours with Jane popping up in some way, and wondered in her REM haze if there were any place Crazy Jane wouldn’t invade her privacy.

[ – To view the next chapter, click here – ]

The Gathering Storm, Part 16

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Janus gave Underworld a lingering eye-to-eye look over the edge of the files he was perusing and through the eyeholes of his half-comedy/half-tragedy mask. He sighed heavily, and Underworld raised one eyebrow.

“What?” she prodded.

“Shrill?”

“Why not?”

“You think we should bring Shrill into the organization?” Janus asked.

“Why not?” Underworld repeated.

“A flamboyant, cross-dressing, bisexual guy who can shriek loud enough to make people’s ear bleed?”

“Are you concerned his presence will threaten your long-held heterosexual beliefs and make you long for his tight-ab body?”

“I’m concerned,” Janus said with sagely intonations, “that he will embarrass us. I am actively trying to recruit Tooth Fairy because she is frightening as hell—sometimes even to me. I have you working on Zoe—which, by the way, needs to come to some sort of conclusion in the next two weeks. I’ll let her have her graduation if you insist, but whether by choice or by abduction, she’s in our hands in 14 days. And that is because I think she has a combination of powers that will make her quite formidable in a fight. Between the two of us—you and me—we are also trying to secure Gunslinger, Mindfuck, Breathtaker, Rancor, Steampunk and Laugh Riot. Shrill has a very unthreatening name and an annoying and unfocused power, and will look ridiculous.”

“More ridiculous than that fat fool Hellfire?” she challenged him.

“You know full well I only want to string him and some of the other loser-level villains along for the sake of cannon fodder,” Janus said. “Or misdirection. In any case, you know they aren’t in for any real cut.”

“Won’t make them look any less foolish—or potentially us by association. Look, do you know how long I’ve had my people working with Shrill?”

“No, I don’t. I never would have guessed you would even have had an interest,” Janus said with exaggerated boredom.

“Well, guess this: Do I look like the kind of person who’d groom a transhuman whose best was to make ears bleed and deafen people—including perhaps any comrades nearby?”

“I suppose not. What have you accomplished?”

“With a nifty little high-tech collar device, which also doubles as a gorgeous choker for my wonderful cross-dresser; work with some neurologists of questionable ethics who have enabled us to understand better how Shrill’s power works and more importantly how it affects others; and several voice coaches, Shrill is very versatile now,” Underworld said. “He can focus his shrieks more precisely now. He can hit pitches that make people not just cower in discomfort but also make them nauseated, disoriented, sleepy and even, under very controlled circumstances, highly suggestible. The name Shrill will keep people focused on what they think he can do, and not wonder at the wide range of things I’ve trained him to do.”

Janus paused. “Is he still going to dress like a girl?”

“Like a woman. And, yes. It’s who he is. He’s even trying to see if he can find a Regenerator or Primal who can make his breasts grow larger so he can lose the padded bra. Get used to it and lose the sexual bigotry.”

Janus paused again, sighed, and shook his head. “Get him to dress like a threatening woman, then. If he’s going to wear dresses, nothing pink or white or yellow. Blacks and deep purples. Dark makeup. Dark hair or white hair. Go Goth. Bonus points for some scary-colored contact lenses. Agreed?”

“Compromise is a beautiful thing, Janus; glad to see you learning the skill—at least with me. Agreed. But if he wants to be frilly or sophisticated or whatever around the HQ on his own time, he gets to. Period. I think he looks great in pink.”

“One more thing. He changes his name to Shriek or Caterwaul.”

“No promises on that one; I’ll discuss it with him. If he agrees, I get to increase his salary by 10% compared to my original plans.”

“I should have recruited Madamnation instead of you as my right hand,” Janus said. “She’s utterly ruthless and deviant but even she wouldn’t stoop to MBA-ing and lawyer-ing me to death.”

* * *

Three hours of planning and negotiating with Janus about the direction of the organization—and arguing over even more annoying things than whether Shrill was worth bringing in—was enough to give Underworld a migraine on the best of days. Today called for a serious does of meds and then killing off an entire bottle of red wine while getting her feet—and maybe something else—rubbed by two particularly submissive members of her personal staff.

Rounding a corner in the level of the office building that Janus had claimed as pretty much his own, Underworld was startled by the sudden presence of another person, moving in the opposite direction and apparently as oblivious to their surroundings at the moment as she was. They crashed together and the pile of files Underworld was carrying tumbled to the floor. The only thing that kept her from swearing was the knowledge that most of them were in stretch-band-sealed portfolio-style folders, so few of them would spill open, if any.

The thudding impact sent Underworld tumbling to her ass on the carpeted floor, and she found herself suddenly grateful for Janus’ ostentatious insistence on putting plush carpeting on his floor of the building.

A hand was on her arm helping her up, as she regained her wits. The files were scattered everywhere. One had opened and spilled out some of its papers.

And the face before her was a woman’s face, heavily tattooed. There was a sweet grin on those lips that utterly belied the many colorful designs of death, blood and mayhem—even as it agreed with the slightly lesser number of happy, sunny-dispositioned images permanently marking that skin. Underworld stepped back just slightly, a sense of unease washing over her. She’d been leery of Crazy Jane—even uncomfortable around her—since learning the full scope of her powers from Janus and the full measure of her psychiatric issues. Truth be told, she’d been avoiding the woman as much as possible and being as disdainful as she could just to keep her away as often as possible.

She made me uncomfortable from the first day Janus brought her into the building, silent and inside a cage, Underworld thought. But I preferred her then, before she could roam the halls.

“Here, let me help you,” Crazy Jane said.

“No, I’m fine,” Underworld said quickly. She injected as much imperious contempt as she could to mask her unease, and hurriedly began collecting files. “I have places to be, and quickly.”

“Sorry I wasn’t watching where I was going,” Crazy Jane said, gathering up the loose papers despite Underworld’s protests. “I was just thinking of all the delicious things I’ve been doing to Dr. Mark’s mind today. I’m so glad Janus let me keep him. Did you know his last name is ‘Blood?’—it’s so appropriate now with some of the things I’m egging him on to do. He’s soooooo fucked up and so eager for me to do more inside that gray matter.”

“Yeah. OK,” Underworld said. “File please?”

“Oh,” Crazy Jane said, and Underworld swore the woman was blushing between the colors of all those tattoos. “I just get so excited about my hobbies. Here you go.”

She handed over the file, their skin briefly touching once more, and Underworld barely suppressing the shudder of revulsion as she wondered if Janus and Jane had plans to decorate her body beyond just her face. Crazy Jane clearly could be useful, but Janus had fashioned her into something so disturbing, visually and in terms of her actions.

“Thanks. I guess,” Underworld said.

“Okey-dokey buh-bye now,” Crazy Jane said, skipping away and humming.

As she left, Underworld continued to feel unease, but there was a new character to it. The headache from her meeting with Janus seemed to have subsided at least, and dwelling on things was likely only to make it flare up again. She continued to her own floor of the building, the image of a severely disturbed and dangerous woman happily skipping stuck in her head like a bit of annoying elevator music for at least a half-hour thereafter.

* * *

The professor for Zoe’s Transhuman Psychology class was apparently at a loss for her own ideas today—instead choosing to play a video recording of a segment of Matt Lauer speaking with noted psychologist and researcher Dr. Joel Manning on an episode of the “Today” show from several months earlier. She’d already seen it, and read all of Manning’s books, so she did her best to tune out and catch some rest in the mostly darkened classroom. She’d slept poorly since Underworld had begun courting her, and she wasn’t even sure Query was doing anything to help. The hero, if he had decided to take up her cause, was known for stealth; she’d probably never see him in action until it was all over.

Or too late.

“So, Dr. Manning,” droned Lauer’s voice from the speakers in the class, “you have some very intriguing thoughts about the mindset and psychology of transhumans. This may be abrupt to start, but I was wondering where you came down on the recent debates about screening all potential mothers and fetuses for known transhuman genes as a matter of not just public safety but public mental health.”

Silence at first, as a frown creased Manning’s brow—Zoe didn’t need her eyes open to recall just how deep that crease had been and how intense Manning’s gaze had become. “Pardon me? I don’t see how transhumans as a whole could be considered a public mental health threat. Not to mention that isn’t the point of any of my research, teaching or writings.”

As Zoe listened to the words she had last heard when the program was airing live, this time with her eyes closed, she could sense something in his tone, and wondered if Lauer and the “Today” show producers had decided to suddenly change the tack of the interview right before going on the air. Had Dr. Manning been suckered into a sort of ambush interview? If would make sense, she considered; she had borne a sneaking suspicion that either Lauer himself or the producers of the show harbored some kind of beef against transhumans. It seemed that slightly negative coverage of them was the norm—very subtle, but still very noticeable to her. Zoe was not shy to admit that she could be thin-skinned and jump to conclusions. Having dark skin in America and being transhuman besides could do that to you. But hypervigilance was better than being caught by bigotry unawares. It helped her see the wrongs that others missed—taking their “normal” privilege for granted.

“Well, Doctor,” Lauer continued, “you note in most of your books, especially in your current one on the bestseller list—Psyches in Flux: Transhuman Minds and the Evolution of Mankind—that transhumans are particularly prone to mental illness.”

“Actually, I said nothing of the sort,” Manning noted, and Zoe recalled how proud she had been of the man’s poise when she had first watched the episode. The strength of conviction in his voice as he adjusted to the unexpected direction of the interview was nothing short of stunning to her, and with her eyes shut now, she respected it even more now without the distraction of visuals.

“Not to put words in your mouth, Doctor, but if I could quote from page 23 of your current book: ‘As is well-known, transhumans exhibit behaviors and personality traits that differ from the accepted norm, and this is more pronounced the older the person is when powers reach full emergence and when multiple groups of powers manifest—and often this is more marked when powers are initiated unnaturally in a human who is otherwise baseline. This is a well-known scientific fact, and one that requires us to consider strongly the direction of humanity and the personality traits that future humans will possess.’ Now, that’s a bit of a mouthful, Dr. Manning, but aren’t you saying that humanity is, at least in the transhuman population, more prone to, and moving more strongly toward, mental illness?”

“No, I’m not.”

“It’s well-known that transhuman villains are more likely to be sociopathic than normal human criminals. Even those who label themselves heroes are often reckless. You note that transhumans tend toward very specific kinds of narcissism, self-centeredness, disdain for authority, snap decisions…need I go on?”

“No, you don’t, because there is no research comparing the cruelty or evil of transhuman villains in the media spotlight vs. the huge number of evil baseline people who outnumber them by far. Also, the words ‘sociopathic’ and ‘psychopathic’ have never cropped up in my books with regard to transhumans in general—only with a subset of them,” Manning noted. “I talk of personality shifts in evolution, not so much about mental illness per se.”

“You don’t see a bunch of narcissistic people who are self-centered and possess powers the rest of us don’t as at least a potential public health threat?” Lauer prodded.

“You know, Matt, as a clinical psychologist who also possesses an advanced degree in philosophy and a bachelor’s in anthropology, I can tell you that the personalities of early humans are likely not much like the personalities we lift up and honor now,” Manning said. “Nor are several personality traits that were respected in the 1300s or even 1700s much in vogue today—like attitudes toward woman and resolving disputes through public violence. It is true that the more powers a transhuman has and the later they appear in life, the more likely for intense personality traits that are outside the norm. Hence all the costumes and grand gestures sometimes on the part of villains and heroes. That’s the desire for attention and sense of self-importance. At the same time, you also see almost obsessive or compulsive behaviors—sometimes overly so—that manifest as an overwhelming sense of duty to protect or an overwhelming desire to have a theme for their crimes, or seek an adversary or some-such.”

“I’m not trying to say transhumans are by their nature dangerous or a threat to healthy evolution, Doctor, but there are people who do say that, and what you’re saying doesn’t seem to contradict—“

“Bullcrap,” Manning said with utter calm. His face was serene, and his voice even. “Utter bullcrap. Alcohol abuse became a whole lot bigger issue when guns came along and then when cars did. It’s easier to pull a trigger in anger than to draw a sword and lop off someone’s head. You aren’t as likely to kill someone drunk horse-riding as drunk-driving. But do we outlaw alcohol as an answer? Or eliminate guns and cars? Maybe, in the world you speak of, potentially screening for transhumans, we should forbid people with a family history of alcoholism from breeding. Getting violently drunk is a form of socially unacceptable behavior. So is being a selfish and mentally abusive lover. Or an obnoxious boss. Or a Type A personality if taken far enough. And yet many people succeed and productively contribute to society even with less-than-stellar personality traits. Even with destructive traits.”

“Then what is your point, Doctor, in your books? I’m simply playing Devil’s advocate here.”

“Are you, Mr. Lauer? Or are you subject to the very fears you are giving legitimacy to here by tacitly defending them?”

“I think you’re reading too much into my words.”

“As you did into out-of-context passages from my book?”

“Touché, Doctor. But what is the point, then? You tell us that psychologically, transhumans may fit a wholly different set of molds than normal—“

“Baseline humans—transhumans are normal too. They are simply another part of humanity. A person with a disability getting around in a wheelchair is not an ‘abnormal’ example of humanity Matt, nor an aboriginal Australian in the middle of the whitest neighborhood in New York City. They simply stand out more. Everyone is ‘abnormal’ in some way, usually many ways.”

“Baseline humans, then,” Lauer conceded. “What is your takeaway lesson, then? If we’re two groups of humans diverging psychologically as well as physically, what do we do?”

“These are tweaks, Mr. Lauer. Evolutionary tweaks. Not wholesale changes that make transhumans utterly alien to baseline humans,” Manning said. “They are still, at heart, far more like baseline humans than not. As with all things in evolution, we adapt. Or we become obsolete if we don’t. Turning transhumans into witches and going on a hunt with torches and pitchforks isn’t the answer.”

“That’s all we have time for, today, Dr. Manning. Many thanks for your time,” Lauer concluded. Zoe was certain she heard a trace of relief in his tone.

“No, thank you, Matt,” Manning said. As Zoe recalled, he stood up immediately upon saying that, and walked off the set before the camera could cut away.

The program clicked off, and the lights went up in the room. Zoe opened her eyes slowly.

“Well, class,” the professor said. “I hope you paid attention to the program. You will have 40 minutes to write an essay in the bluebooks Keith is passing out defending either Dr. Manning’s side or Mr. Lauer’s, making sure to use elements of at least three of the following transhuman psych theories in your work: either Thomason’s, Kluwer’s, Bacon’s, Muteesa’s, Ho’s, Garrison’s or Podeski’s. You may not use or refer to Manning’s theories in your work.”

Zoe’s lips formed a rueful smile. No problem. I’ve been writing this essay in my head since I first saw that damn segment anyway, professor. I’ve probably been mentally writing it since I found out I wasn’t baseline anymore.

* * *

At the sound of the voice, which had only said “So” in a deep and solemn tone from the nearby shadows, Solstice jerked to attention, her thermal and cryokinetic powers at the ready.

“I’m not here to hurt you, Solstice,” the voice said, and from the shadows she saw Query approach, then stop about 15 feet away from her. “Good evening. How are you doing?”

“Was doing fine until you got my adrenaline pumping like that,” she said. “To what do I owe the honor of a personal visit from Query?”

“Have you heard about a string of disappearances lately? Eight women so far?”

Solstice pursed her lips for a moment, then shrugged. “I haven’t heard of a string of disappearances—I might have heard of a couple here and there lately. I don’t really do missing persons, Query. Seems more your speed.”

His head bobbed in a short, quick nod. “Yes, sometimes it is. Did you know that Marty the Hun got out of jail?”

“No way,” Solstice said. “How the fuck did he manage that?”

“It’s what he’s good at, among other things,” Query noted. “You might have kept tabs on him after taking him down.”

“Not my speed.”

“Sometimes, speed kills. Carelessness destroys,” Query said gravely.

“I’m guessing you have a point here, but what is it? I took him down. The cops or D.A. let him out. Maybe I’ll get a chance to nail him again.”

“Maybe next time you should hit the nail harder. The women started going missing within days of Marty’s release. They’re all Asian. Female. Your rough height and build.”

“What the hell does that…oh, shit,” Solstice said. “He’s just randomly grabbing women hoping one of them turns out to be me?”

“Marty isn’t known for forgiveness,” Query responded. “Or subtlety. Or patience.”

“Why are you riding me about this? I feel like shit for the women, then, but I don’t know the first thing about tracking someone down, Marty or otherwise. I get info, I act on it. I see a crime, I act. I’m no investigator.”

Query set something down on the ground at his feet. “Here’s a start,” he said. “A thumb drive with some leads. Start learning to investigate, so you can clean up your messes in the future.”

“Look, asshole,” Solstice said. “I bust my ass out like you or anyone else in the hero gig. Don’t get on a high horse. I can’t be accountable for every crook I rough up or get arrested. What are you suggesting—that I kill them all in the future to head this shit off?”

“Far from it,” Query said. “I try to avoid killing if I can help it, or there would be hundreds of dead bodies in my wake. But next time, especially if you’re going to humiliate a vicious, sadistic, amoral man with resources to get revenge before you call the cops on him, you should make sure you don’t leave so many loopholes for him to use. You might want to make sure when the police arrive there is a clear chain of evidence for them to nail the asshole.”

Query snorted, turned on his heel, and walked away.

“Because if you did,” he concluded as he walked away slowly. “There might be a few more live women tonight. They’ve started finding the bodies now. Those poor girls aren’t missing. They’re dead. Probably tortured first. Marty the Hun doesn’t leave loose ends. Your problem now, though. I have my own young lady to try to keep safe.”

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The Gathering Storm, Part 10

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After a long day of meting out justice—or perhaps just venting her frustrations over life’s problems on the few kinds of people on whom it was more or less socially acceptable to do so—Solstice really just wanted to relax, grab a quick bite, and get acquainted with her bed.

Instead, she was met by the words, “Hey, Michele, welcome back!” and an upraised arm with a half-empty glass of soda being shaken back and forth as the woman added the words, “Drink’s a little warm.”

Shaking her head in half-amused irritation, Michele Cho stepped over to the couch, touched the glass of her stepsister and roommate for a few seconds, and used her cryokinetic powers to cool the beverage down to something near refrigerator temperature. She could smell just a hint of rum wafting up from the Coca-Cola.

“Thanks,” Isabella said. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around aside from that half-the-rent and half-the-bills thing.”

“That and my sunny disposition and the sheer joy of my company,” Michele responded dryly. “Why I keep your demanding and bitchy ass around, though, I’m not entirely sure.”

“I’m adorable and bitchy. You know you want me bad.”

“Oh God, that’s unseemly and depraved even for you, Izzie. We’re sisters.”

“Hardly. You the almost full-blooded Chink and me the almost full-blooded Spic. Sisters? Does not compute.”

Michele snorted a half-laugh. Isabella was right, of course—there wasn’t much sisterly in their relationship. Her Chinese father and the other woman’s Puerto Rican mother had married when Michele was 14 and Izzie was 12 and neither had ever viewed her respective stepparent as anything other than an annoyance.

“Still, it would be really awkward to explain you and me sleeping together at the family gatherings at holiday time,” Michele noted. “Not to mention the fact that you don’t go for girls, so why would I bother with keeping you around as a potential piece of tail? I don’t need to work on converting someone when I can get dates easy enough outside the apartment.”

“Not to mention the fact you don’t like brunettes,” Isabella said, flipping a bit of her hair for effect.

“Not true at all. I’m not generally attracted to brunette women—blondes and redheads all the way there,” Michele said. “Men, though—I love me some tall, dark and handsome there. Brown and black hair for the XY chromosome recreational nookie.”

“Fickle bitch,” Isabella muttered. “Hey, don’t go to bed too soon. I might need my drink chilled again.”

“Then get some ice you lazy twat,” Michele said with good-natured affront.

“So, how did the whole superwoman thing go tonight?” Isabella called out as Michele stepped into the kitchen and pulled out her Solstice cowl from her shoulder bag to give it a quick wash in the sink. “No trouble, I hope. No one got a good hit in on you, did they?”

“Nah,” Michele said. “Strictly losers tonight. I was busy and I’m tired, but it wasn’t even a challenge. Lots ’o bad guys, but zero skill.”

“Just don’t get cocky,” Isabella said. “I may find you to be a gloomy, pretentious Goth freak, but you’re still technically family as well as my roomie, so you’re my gloomy pretentious Goth freak. I don’t want to be dropping some roses on a casket for you until you’re at least in your 60s.”

“I’ll do my best to stay safe and alive, you self-absorbed, overly entitled slut,” Solstice said, blowing a kiss.

Isabella snatched the phantom kiss from the air and made as if she was popping into her mouth, then pantomimed chewing and swallowing. “Love you, too, Michele.”

* * *

Only a few days old now, the month of May did not look to be shaping up as a sunny time, Zoe considered as she nursed a soft drink and picked at the appetizer before her. This was the fourth time now that Underworld had treated her to a recruitment meal and each time, Zoe could feel her time running out more and more. She should be looking forward to graduation in about six weeks, but instead she could only envision doom. Underworld had made it clear that Janus wanted her to recruit Zoe soon and that college plans should be discarded—whether Zoe complied with Janus’ desires or decided to flee.

Zoe wanted a cap and gown and diploma, a little down time, a little time in the work world, and then start applying to grad school.

Instead, a madman was mentally fitting her for a costume and a criminal career, using Underworld as his proxy.

Underworld had gotten very good at reading Zoe’s expressions and discerning the track of her thoughts, and smiled. “Tick, tock; tick, tock,” the villainess said. She was wearing an auburn wig today and clothes that made her look a little like a soccer mom. “Are you feeling Janus’ breath on the back of your neck?”

“You’re an evil bitch,” Zoe said mildly.

“Hardly. You want to know about evil bitches, you should meet Madamnation.”

“Madame Nation? Who’s that? Some jingoistic villainess with a patriotic theme?”

“You really don’t like to follow the transhuman crowd in the news or on the web, do you?” Underworld noted. “Not Madame Nation. Madamnation. Madame plus Damnation. And believe me, she takes the demonic and hellishness thing all the way. The only fellow female for whom I’d reserve the use of the word cunt.”

“Guess you and her have some history,” Zoe noted, trying to keep the discussion away from Janus. The closer the talk came to him, the more her anxiety deepened.

“History? Yeah. She runs a website, too, for all the fanboys and girls, just like I do,” Underworld said. “Except where I do merchandise, book sales and soft porn or artistic sexy images, she’s riding high on the kinky stuff. Fetish, full nudity, a whole stable of girls with cam shows and everything. Tacky, slutty stuff all the way.”

“And more popular because of that, of course,” Zoe added, relishing the chance to get even a small dig into the woman relentlessly recruiting her.

“True. The web was always ripe for the most base desires and for our darkest fantasies to be made readily accessible, wasn’t it? But we’ve also crossed paths in criminal endeavors and she’s done me wrong there, too. Still, as much as I hate her and as unbalanced as she is, she’s less psychotic than Janus, so that’s one plus in her column. Maybe you should see if she’ll take you in and shield you from us.”

Zoe groaned as the conversation again steered where she didn’t want it.

“Really, Zoe,” Underworld continued. “You need to make a decision soon. Janus is a terror, to be true, but he can be managed and I can help you learn how to avoid the dangers. To be honest, I think it might be nice to make you my protégé. You’d find a lot to like on our side of the line, my dear. Crime really does pay when you’re smart enough to do it right. While I don’t like his approach much, Janus and I both know the business, we complement each other, and you’ll do a lot better financially with us than you will with corporate America.”

“I have this nagging moral streak, you see.”

“Oh, yes, the moral streak that allows you to lie to the NCAA that you’re not transhuman, so that you can get scholarship money to pay for college. What does Jesus think of that, Zoe?”

“Don’t go there. Don’t,” Zoe said with unvarnished threat in her tone.

“You see? Zoe, I’m a hardened criminal. I publicly crippled Glory Boy. I’ve escaped prison twice. I’m not a sociopath, but I’m dangerous all the same. And right now, you show that spark again that you aren’t cowed by me. That’s the kind of spirit I want to work with. Yes, I’m worried about you being close to Janus but I think he’s got the right idea about your potential, and I’m really warming to the idea of mentoring you.”

“Not interested.”

“How long can you put it off before you realize you don’t have any choice?”

“There are always choices. And they don’t have to be limited to running away or bending my knee to Janus—or you,” Zoe noted.

Underworld looked around slowly, assessed her surroundings, and then smiled. “I don’t think you’ve brought in the authorities yet, but I admit I was wondering for a moment there. I am curious why you haven’t yet done so.”

“Because if I do, you or Janus might be mad enough to kill me—or worse.”

“Now, now, Zoe. You know we aren’t going to throw away such potential as you have over something like that. You’d only get hurt…a little. And don’t try to play as if you’re afraid of me. What’s the real reason you don’t call in the cops and tell them about me and my efforts to recruit you?”

“Easy. For one thing, I don’t ever know where we’re meeting until the last minute.”

“Oh, I’m sure the FBI would love to stake you out and be ready at a moment’s notice to follow you and try to nab me,” Underworld pointed out.

“Oh, yes, and won’t it be so nice to have to tell them I’m transhuman and possibly trash the college education that I’m still hoping I can finish before I have to figure out how to get Janus and you to fuck off.”

“Well, there are always the so-called ‘white hats’ that you could call in,” Underworld noted with an air of disdain.

“Oh, yes, because it’s so easy to just call up a superhero to come on over and help—or to be my bodyguard for a while,” Zoe said. “And a transhuman battle on campus between you and some super-dude would be so fucking great for my college career. And yeah, I have tried to see if there are any who I could get to help, just in case. But they don’t have receptionists.”

“Well, some of them…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Zoe said dismissively. “Super groups. Teams. Sure. I’ve done my research. Most of them are more like clubs. A bunch of transhumans who sort of get along but none of whom think the others know shit. They’ll have an office and a phone number for a few months and then they can’t keep up with the bills any more and the number they had in the phone book is disconnected, their website hasn’t been updated in months, and their e-mail inbox is overloaded and kicking back your messages. The only transhumans who always keep their phones operational are mercenaries, and I can’t afford one of them.”

“I see someone has been doing some homework other than prepping for final exams,” Underworld noted.

“As if I’m going to sit on my ass while you and Janus map out my life without my consent?” Zoe said. “There are only what—three legitimate transhuman hero teams?—and one of them is in California, the other one’s in Texas, and the third is in New York and its has such a low opinion of New Judah that they wouldn’t come across the Long Island Sound to do anything here if you paid them. And the fucking Guardian Corps are all about street crime and training new heroes. So, yeah, I’ve got lots of backup, don’t I?” Zoe finished with a sarcastic note.

“That’s what I like about you, Zoe. Proactive. Thorough. Practical. Logical. Fearless. You’ve been working the angles and you’re not afraid to make sure I know it. Join us, Zoe. I’ll keep Janus off you. He has Crazy Jane back in his hands and that makes him happier, and I’ll find new playthings for him, too. You don’t have to worry.”

“Put myself in your loving hands. Lesser of two evils, huh?”

“I’m not so evil, Zoe. I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”

“Go ahead, steal lines from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but that doesn’t change the fact I don’t trust you to have my best interests at heart,” Zoe said. “I’m still weighing options. I figure it’s going to take you at least two or three more lunches to convince me.”

“I doubt Janus will let me do this more than four or five more times before he steps in, Zoe, so I hope you’re right,” Underworld said. “And I hope you make the smart choice.”

Oh, I plan to, Zoe thought, as she idly fingered the smart phone in her pocket. And now that I finally have a number worth calling, I have more choices than you think. At least I hope I do; I don’t know what kind of response time I can count on with this option.

* * *

Carl wasn’t sure he liked Query’s new office all that much—this building was even older than the last one, and smaller, too. After the attack at the last one, he felt more exposed now. But he supposed he would also get used to it soon enough.

“I trust you passed on the chance to dance with, fondle, feel up or neck with any strange women, right?” Query asked. It was the first time they had met face-to-face for business purposes since the destruction of the previous office.

“Learned my lesson,” Carl said. “Mr. Beacham has turned over a whole new leaf in terms of fidelity thanks to almost getting killed before.”

“Don’t refer to yourself in the third person. You’re not famous or eccentric enough.”

“Agreed,” Carl said. “So, is there an escape route behind the bookcase, just in case?”

“If we need to escape, that’s the point at which you’ll find out where I’ve put it. But you also passed through several screeners on the way in here, and I think you’re clean. I clearly need to step up my paranoia level now that Janus is in the region,” Query said. “So, on to the business stuff, which I’m sure has backed up. What do you have for me?”

“Backed up is an understatement,” Carl noted. “I haven’t been able to screen or research all of the calls. Fortunato is trying to reach you…”

“He can go fuck himself,” Query interrupted. “At least until I have a personal reason to want to talk to him, then he can have his say. Go on.”

“The FBI and ATF both want to talk to you—I think they’ve guessed that the whole hit squad thing at your last office had something to do with you…”

“The ‘fuck off’ thing goes triple for them,” Query noted. “Next?”

“A senior at UConn New Judah says Janus is trying to press her into service, using Underworld as a recruiter. She wants help, she’s asking for discretion, and even though she tried to sound tough in her message, there’s a strong undertone of ‘scared shitless’,” Carl said. “She’s also left several e-mails.”

“Trap?”

“Too soon to tell. Could be. Good chance. Janus would want to make it look good, and this student is likely already in his pocket and ready to stab us in the back when we—rather, you—show up to help. On the other hand…”

“I don’t want to leave some girl twisting in the wind while Janus is stalking her—if she’s on the up-and-up.”

“Exactly,” Carl said.

“All right. Be discreet. Get in touch with her. Find out if she seems to be playing it straight. Let me know what you think. I’ll have to trust your judgment.”

“All in a day’s work, boss,” Carl said, batting his eyelashes and smiling in a purposefully insincere manner.

“Yeah, Carl, I know the check is late. I would say it’s in the mail, but I actually have it right here,” Query said, handing over an envelope. “Have I ever let you down?”

“No, and that’s why I try not to let you down either, Query.”

“Just stay away from loose women with transmitters to drop in your pocket, Carl, and you probably won’t let me down ever again—Patsy will be a lot happier too. All right, what else do you have for me?”

As Carl turned over the sheet of paper on his clipboard, and Query spied how many lay underneath it, he knew it was going to be a long night.

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