Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Page 6

  “So we just watch?”

  “We just watch. You can be there in less than half a minute if it goes bad, but you’d be the only A Class. So we—”

  “Here it comes.” David toggled something on his station and the big screen’s image changed to an exterior shot of the bank. It hadn’t opened for business yet, and it looked like all the employees had gotten out and away from the building—a good thing when the wall exploded.

  “What is that?” I was floating again, and I realized I’d crossed myself.

  A construct of brick, stone, metal, pieces of floor and walls and even desks, lurched through the hole and straightened up. Vaguely human-shaped, it had to be at least fifteen feet tall.

  “Dr. Beth calls it a construct projection. Much like the Tin Man’s creations last year, except they make it by crushing together whatever is handy. The media call them wreck-golems.”

  It looked like it had bits of bank vault attached, and it lumbered into the street.

  “Bystanders?” Blackstone asked.

  “Evacuation count has everyone who was supposed to be there out of the bank. Outside…” David flipped through video feeds. It looked like the street had emptied in true Chicago fashion, only cops and capes showing their heads. I spotted K-Strike and Red Robin, other West Side Guardians. The wreck-golem thumped towards the police cordon and Chicago’s finest opened up on it. Pieces began to come off the thing—at least half the police cars had to have racked heavy arms in their trunks, a couple of small shoulder launchers—but it didn’t slow down.

  “Blackstone…”

  SaFire hit the thing in the back, shooting from the hole in the bank to flatten it. Yes! A couple of dispatchers were unprofessional enough to applaud even as a second wreck-golem pulled itself through the hole.

  The dragon diving out of the Sun landed on it.

  “Hey what?” Shell shrieked in my ear. My mouth stayed open.

  “Astra, go! Get Kindrake out of there!” Blackstone pointed at the exit hatch in case I’d gone deaf, started yelling into his headset. I was up and out in a rush, my heart in my throat, almost clipping the side of the shaft in my haste.

  “Get Kindrake off her ride and out of the combat zone.” Blackstone clarified as I flew. “Terraflore is tough, but she most definitely is not.”

  “On it,” I manage before my parabola ended with the much-too-crowded street. I dropped under the first golem’s reach to spring sideways and sweep Kindrake off her beasty’s back.

  “Hey!”

  “Did you come to Chicago to die?” I dropped the Goth-girl behind the police line. “Stay here!”

  SaFire and Terraflore had the second golem down, and I hammered into the first before it could grab at SaFire. It broke in half and I punched its head off for good measure—it’s not like it had brains, but the psychological rules that governed breakthroughs and went into stuff like this usually meant taking off its head would finish it.

  So naturally the pieces merged.

  “Just keep yours away from everyone, Astra,” Blackstone instructed. “Terraflore and SaFire are keeping the first one pinned.”

  “What. If. There’s. More?” The thing kept mindlessly trying to twist past me, but hitting it focused its attention.

  “Then we’ll handle it. Fight your own and stay away from the bank—you saw this crew’s area-denial power and I don’t want you trying them alone.”

  Pounding the construct to pieces that stayed pieces took work, and I saved my breath for doing the job. Action happened out of the corner of my eye, and once green and orange “flame” washed over everybody close to the bank, and then the thing gave up. It stopped trying to reform, and a few punches scattered it across the street in a cloud of concrete dust.

  When Dispatch gave the “stand down” I resisted the urge to drop to the street and just breathe. Media had to be taping—probably broadcasting live—and yes, a Chicago News drone hovered just up the street. I didn’t look at it.

  “Deliveries?” I gasped.

  “Not this time, my dear. Amongst yourselves, you kept everything contained and there are no injuries to move. Say hello to Captain Verres, and come—”

  “Astra, ignore that last direction,” The Harlequin broke in. “Do not leave the area without congratulating Kindrake. If you can, get her to come to the Dome. Understood?”

  I pushed dust-caked hair off my mask, hands still shaking a little from the adrenaline spike and the sick fear when I’d seen Kindrake drop into the fight. “Understood.”

  Optics. Spin. Never mind that Kindrake had dropped into the middle of an action without authorization or coordination, or that she’d risked getting smeared into something Chicago News would have to pixelate out of its broadcast footage—the two of us had mixed it up less than forty eight hours ago in a mess that was sure to become the most watched hero-on-hero fight of the year if not ever. My mother’s daughter, I understood perfectly; media perception was everything.

  I went to find Kindrake.

  * * *

  “Hollywood heroes. Just when you think that all the clichés and stereotypes can’t be true, you realize ‘Yup—they are’.”

  “Be nice, Shell. Seven isn’t like that.”

  “Seven is Seven. Why is she here, and what’s she doing out without her handlers?”

  Shell had me there—I had no clue, and I was pretty sure that when her people found out she was in Chicago her lawyer’s head would explode. Lawyers plural, a whole firm’s worth. A not-so-nice part of me wanted to be there to watch.

  Kindrake knew how to “not notice” the cameras as well as I did, but the smile she showed the police and newsies disappeared when she saw me headed for her. Maybe her scowl was habitual, it certainly went well with her brooding Goth look, but she couldn’t do dark. Knowing Artemis, I knew dark from dramatic posing and the rainbow streaks in Kindrake’s raven hair didn’t help. But she had to coordinate with her flying lizard accessories somehow, I supposed.

  The cameras got shots of my smile and her scowl when we shook hands, spinning the game into my court. I leaned in before she could open her mouth.

  “Hello again, Kindrake, and welcome to Chicago. Blackstone sends his compliments and extends the hospitality of the Dome.” I nodded to Captain Verres. “Captain. Sorry I can’t stay.”

  He knew what to do and played the moment with an easy shrug. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks for coming, Astra.”

  “Hey—” Kindrake managed, but I’d already released her hand and floated upward. A last nod and lazy salute so the newsies could see I wasn’t ignoring her, and I sped away.

  “Good job,” Quin said. “Now straight home. She might not follow, but she’ll look pretty lame standing there and this keeps a potentially explosive conversation away from the listening media.” It said something about how much awkward media experiences I’d survived that she didn’t have to tell me that. Talking with Kindrake in front of the newsies would have been risky as poking a Siberian tiger (well, risky for anyone else, I thought the big kitties were cuddly), but publicly ignoring her would have been unthinkable.

  “She’s following,” Shell observed. “Terraflore makes a hell of a downdraft taking off.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t look back. “So, what happened there at the end?”

  “There was a third wreck-golem still in the bank, kept all of the other Guardians’ tougher guys from poking their heads too far in. Sprints made a fast run in afterward—that last “flame” blast covered the crew’s blowing an exit into the sewers and they were able to break contact and get gone. Same MO as in Florida except they pick a different departure route each time.”

  “Any idea what was— Never mind, I’m sure Fisher will tell us later. Is Kindrake close behind me?” I’d flown a lot slower than usual, but had no idea how fast a dragon moved along.

  “Right behind you,” Shell chirped as I descended on the Dome. The bay doors rumbled wider, but there was no way the beasty was going to fit through. Dropping to the
floor of the bay, I looked up to see what Kindrake’s solution would be.

  “Wow. Now that is cool.”

  Terraflore burst into a rainbow explosion of light, dumping Kindrake from her perch, and reformed into a flight of much smaller jewel-bright drakes that grabbed onto various parts of her before she had a chance to fall more than a few feet. The whole bright cloud drifted down, wings beating like hummingbirds.

  “Cool,” I echoed, debating her mass and their relative wing-size. “And breaking so many laws of physics.”

  “Says the floaty girl.”

  I touched back down—yes I’d started up to catch her.

  “Hey!” Kindrake started as soon as her feet hit the bay floor. “I came out here to talk to you!”

  And just like that, I’d had enough.

  “Really? Really? And you decided to announce yourself by dropping into the middle of an action without coordinating with anybody? You—” I gulped a breath, tried for less than a scream. “Who trained you? What made it a good idea to put yourself into the middle of a fight with concrete puppets? Do you know how close you came to—I nearly had to call your parents to explain that their daughter flew to Chicago and ended up a messy smear on her dragon’s back!”

  “That would have been my job,” Blackstone said from the doorway. Ignoring Kindrake’s agitated friends, he stepped into the bay and let the door close behind him. His tux and hat trumped Kindrake’s Gothy black without even trying; it wasn’t a costume or pose, it was him.

  “Stand down, Astra.” He doffed his hat, vanishing it with a twirl. Okay, maybe a little of it was pose—he did like the stage. “However, I too find myself considering the question of your training, young lady. Indeed, Astra nailed the concrete points on the head. Surely you can do better in the absence of a director?” He tapped his cane absently and metronomically.

  Kindrake winced, the first real expression I’d seen that wasn’t angry or sullen.

  “I came to apologize.”

  “I would think that, of those involved in the events the other night, you are the one who has the least to apologize for.”

  “Terraflore ate your teammate!”

  “Ah. Of course there is that. You wish to apologize to Grendel? Astra can take you to him.”

  “It’s not just—” The girl visibly deflated. “My agent pushed me at Powerteam. Said it would be a good transition into my adult career…”

  “Say no more, certainly not while our lawyers are still dueling each other. And you have my sympathies. However.” He tapped the cane once, emphatically. “I must tell you that, should you pull another stunt such as today’s in Chicago, I will ensure that you cannot even fly over this town without being fined enough to put a dent in your generous syndication residuals. Am I clear?”

  With a nod for me and a smile Kindrake could interpret any number of ways, he disappeared in an understated sparkle of light.

  “Tah-daaaah!” Shell supplied. I opened my mouth but had nothing.

  I stripped off my mask. “Okay, let’s go see Grendel.”

  * * *

  We found Grendel in Ozma’s lab, and nobody could have been more surprised to see Kindrake than he was. Nix instantly hated her, and the sight of Nix and Kindrake’s ruby-red drake glaring at each other from their shoulder-perches had even unflappable Ozma covering her mouth.

  I left them to it, confident that Ozma could handle any ego-driven stupidity, and finally went to deal with my own issues.

  Only to find that Jacky was already asleep. She didn’t sleep like the dead anymore, but being a living breathing daywalker only meant she didn’t burst into flame on contact with sunlight and could enjoy a solid meal—she preferred to work at night when she was most powerful, and I wasn’t going to risk waking her. Besides, she’d left a note in my rooms. She’d written it down so I could swallow it or even reduce it to plasma in Vulcan’s lab if I was paranoid enough. According to Jacky, I was never paranoid enough.

  It read “I’m getting stonewalled by my handler. Contact says some kind of big conference. Wait.”

  “Drat.” I sighed.

  “You have got to do better than that. Someone’s going to take away your Adult Card.” Today Virtual Shell’s t-shirt just read Boo! She tended to descend to ghost-girl humor when Jacky was around.

  I tried to scowl but my smile won. “Don’t you have something to do?”

  “Doing it, but Jamal’s cheating so he’s probably going to win our Halo game. What are we going to do?”

  Wait until evening? Let Jacky try again? That was the smart thing to do, but the echoes of last night’s nightmare twisted my stomach every time I remembered. It hadn’t felt like the other Kitsune dreams. Had it come out of my own subconscious fears or had Kitsune amped up the warning? Whichever, now the thought of waiting even a few hours made me queasily sick. Why did I always have everything but time?

  I sighed again. Jacky’s going to kill me.

  “I’m going to make another call.”

  Chapter Seven

  I’m the leader of a team of heroes. I’m the leader of a team of heroes. I’m still wrapping my head around what that means.

  From the journal of Hope Corrigan.

  * * *

  Jacky once told me that if you wanted to get an intelligence agent’s attention, you should tell him something that you’re not supposed to know. It might not be the kind of attention you wanted, but it would be undivided.

  Technically, Veritas wasn’t a spook and the DSA wasn’t an intelligence agency, but it still engaged in spooky activities and kept its own secrets; from what few things Artemis was willing to share, I had a pretty good idea that labels like “black ops” and even “wet-work” could be applied to some of its activities. The DSA monitored Persons of Interest, and after everything with the Teatime Anarchist I was that already. The benefit was that I knew people and they knew me; Veritas’ number sat on my speed-dial and I’d been the focus of his attention before.

  “Veritas here,” he answered after two rings.

  “Something bad is going to happen at Camp Necessity.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. Kitsune warned me.”

  That got several beats of silence. I wasn’t sure how far up the chain of authority Veritas hung out, but he was certainly somewhere on the other side of the stone wall Jacky had run into. His cosmically creepy breakthrough power to sense all lies—over the phone, recorded, or even written down—meant he had to have access to people who made hard decisions fast.

  They were probably careful talking to him, too.

  “You have spoken to him?” Of course he knew the name; after last year Kitsune was a Person of Interest to the DSA. And to the CIA, Interpol, and NaichM (he was a Japanese national, after all).

  “No. Just a message his usual way.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He probably wants to put me in the middle of it.”

  “What do you need?”

  It was my turn to think hard. “—I think I need to get in the middle of it.”

  “I see. Thank you, Astra. We will be in touch.” He hung up.

  I inhaled. I’d stopped breathing in and out sometime in the conversation.

  Shell had been watching my cellphone like it was a bomb. “Could he be more sinister? ‘We will be in touch.’”

  “The base is a DSA-US Marshals operation, Shell.”

  “And you need to be in the middle of it? What is that about?”

  I laughed helplessly. “He asked.”

  I hadn’t even thought about it until he did. If a warning was enough, would Kitsune have reached out to me? Why me? And I had to remember that Kitsune wasn’t a Good Guy. Last year he’d plotted to take down some very bad people, and he had, but his motive had been personal and he’d started an organized crime war that left innocent people dead, even helped it along. He was a thief, a criminal, a vigilante at best. In at least one possible future he had gotten Blackstone killed.

  So you’re o
n the mental speed-dial of a supervillain. Yay, Hope.

  At least we didn’t need to worry about DSA attention the way we had when Shell had been living inside Galatea last year—if the government got paranoid now, the worst they could do was bar her access to the Dome’s computer system. Probably.

  I wiped my face. Yuck. First a shower and a change—concrete dust got everywhere—and then things to do. There was always something.

  The therapeutic shower seriously improved my outlook, and finally being able to answer the flurry of texts from the Bees—normal after any public cape-action—helped even more. They always knew I was fine since Shell had promised to tell them if I wasn’t, but one text from Julie simply read Talk soon? Please. That one got a Tonight. Love U. Come hell or high water (an Atlasism too appropriate to the past week), I’d see Julie tonight.

  The after-action report of the morning was easy enough to write; Dispatch always attached relevant audio and video files, which meant I could get away with a bare “went there, did that, see video log” when my actions didn’t need special explanation.

  Reviewing Detective Fisher’s preliminary case report wasn’t much fun; Max confirmed Blackstone’s assessment that the heist crew was almost certainly the team the media had dubbed The Repo Men. But that meant they hadn’t cracked the vault for the usual fungibles: cash, bonds, family jewels. And it did look like they’d ignored all of that and gone for a specific box—a queasy-making echo of the bank heist that had started our desperate fight with Villains Inc. last year.

  But the resemblance ended there; they’d taken out the vault cameras, and the bank was playing Switzerland. Max was waiting for a warrant to get the records showing who the deposit box belonged to—he believed that if the Repo Men stayed true to form, they’d “repossessed” something on behalf of someone else.