Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (7 page)

“Why, what happened on Wall Street this morning?” I asked, playing innocent. “Did somebody knock over a bank or something?”

“Ms. Nealon, what do you think of Captain Frost and Gravity Gal? Have they inspired you to come up with your own superhero name?”

That one evinced a scowl, though I was trying to keep my head down as I waited for my checked bag. Damn me for not squeezing everything into a carry-on. “Everything cool is already trademarked,” I said.

“What about Power Girl? Or Mega Girl—”

I spun on the crowd of reporters. “If anyone calls me ‘Fill-in-the-blank-Girl,’ I will slap them so hard in the balls that they’ll spit them out like watermelon seeds.” I scanned the crowd, which had fallen into a stunned silence. “I see you believe me. Good.” I caught movement on the conveyer out of the corner of my eye and scooped up my suitcase, which was, at Ariadne’s suggestion, adorned with a pink tassel. So I could recognize it, and, apparently, soften my image in front of the entire world since a boatload of paparazzi took about a thousand pictures of it. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go haggle with a scalper for theater tickets.” And I flew over their heads and shot out the door.

The hot, humid New York summer hit me full in the face. I landed on the pavement just as a black sedan screeched to a stop in front of me, the mob of reporters at my heels. Lieutenant Allyn Welch was waiting behind the wheel. “Get in,” he said.

“But the sign inside says not to trust rides from unlicensed cabbies—”

“Get in before the savages catch up with you,” he said, and I took heed, tossing my luggage over the seat into the back. I jumped in, and he tore away from the curb before I’d even closed the door, clearly as happy to get away from the damned press as I was.

“Good flight?” Welch said, the air from the open driver’s side window blowing through his thin hair, rendering his comb-over even more of a mess.

“Got a little bumpy at the end,” I said, watching the cluster of paparazzi that we were leaving in the dust. “I hope it’s not a sign of things to come.”

When Mr. Penny the banker had left, Jamie stayed in her office and put her head down on her desk, giving her forehead a good thud against the wood a few times—gently, of course. It always had to be gentle these days, otherwise she’d break right through the desk.

“How’d the meeting go?” Clarice asked, sneaking into the room almost soundlessly. Almost, because Jamie had meta hearing now, and the click of the locking mechanism was like a cannon shot to her.

“He was a really nice guy,” Jamie said, lifting her head to rest her chin on the surface of her desk. She pushed hair back over her head, then folded her hands in front of her and just laid there, chin on the desk, as Clarice came in and sat down. She had a little buzz of excitement about her, vibrations Jamie could practically feel across the empty space between them. “He had ideas for how we can make things run better around here. How we can maybe get into profitability, finally.”

“That’s good,” Clarice said. She was the soul of encouragement. “And he wasn’t mad that you were late?”

Jamie closed her eyes. “Didn’t seem to be.”

“That’s … interesting,” Clarice said, and it sounded like there was more to tell.

Jamie opened her eyes. “What’s interesting?”

“Oh, nothing,” Clarice said, holding back. It was clearly something, and it only took her a second to break, leaning forward, eyes alight. “He was kinda impatient before you got here.”

Jamie concentrated, trying to put it together but failing. “I … don’t see whatever you’re—”

“He was impatient and irritable with me before you came in—”

“Maybe he’s a racist.”

“—and he’s totally cool when you come in?” Clarice ignored her jibe, giving her a knowing look. “I saw how he was talking to you. I think you walking in turned his attitude around.”

“Uck,” Jamie said, slumping so that her face pressed against the paper calendar pages that lay across her desk. The paper was cool and a little scratchy against her cheek. “He’s probably five years older than Kyra.”

“You could be a cougar,” Clarice said, clearly taking this possibility and running with it. “All,
mrow
and—”

“Please stop,” Jamie said.

“I mean, did you see that boy? He was
built
—”

“I just want …” Jamie said, lifting her head off the desk. She stopped, the raw weariness of the use of her powers to cross to Manhattan and back this morning, the stress of saving Nadine Griffin, arguing with her and Frost and Kyra, and then remembering that her life was waiting with an urgent appointment of its own back here on the island … “I just want things to be smoother. I want the business to work. I want for everyone here to be okay.” She lifted a hand and gestured around the walls separating her from her employees. “I just want everything to be okay.”

And I want for things between me and Kyra to be better.

Clarice looked at her pityingly. “I didn’t hear anything about a man in there anywhere, and it makes me sad for you. Squad goals don’t have to be the only goals in your life.”

“But they’re the only ones I need to bring to work,” Jamie said, pulling herself off her desk. She looked out the windows into the building’s interior and saw, fortunately, no one in the hall. Her office was a little off the beaten path, but normally she would have lowered the blinds before indulging in such a blatant display of self-pity as putting her head on her desk.
No time for that
, she thought, pulling her hair back and grabbing a binder out of the drawer. She whipped a ponytail into shape in seconds while Clarice watched her with something between envy and annoyance, and then Jamie shut her desk drawer firmly, a symbolic closing on a disastrous morning.

“All right,” she said, trying to fill her voice with renewed energy. “It’s going to be a better afternoon—”

“Because a handsome banker with a cute butt and gorgeous eyes walking in to hand you money and profitability is just a bust of a start to the day—”

“Clarice,” Jamie said, back to peppy, positive and affirmed. “We have work to do.”

Clarice looked like she was torn between serving up another piece of her mind and the need to get on about the—surely numerous—things on her schedule. Her mouth was slightly open, a mutinous look in those dark eyes, but a professional smile won out over the look that would have told Jamie that her best friend was about to tear a strip out of her backside. “We’ll talk about this later,” Clarice said. Jamie knew that they would, in great detail, but for now Clarice left, shutting the door behind her, and Jamie nodded once, sure of her direction, and dove into the pile of invoices sitting at the corner of her desk.

I don’t like traffic, as a rule. It has a lot to do with my distaste for crowds and waiting. Some people—mostly reporters—have taken this to mean I don’t like people. It’s actually the opposite. I like people, at least in the abstract. Or on an individual basis. Or as a general, whole idea.

But when you put them in crowds and unleash them around me, I get antsy. There are a few reasons for this, none of which really bear discussing right now, save for the one where being surrounded by people feels a little like bugs crawling over my skin. It’s nothing they do; it’s the fact that I can … feel them around me. Walking. Talking. Existing. Ignoring me (hopefully). They’re a presence that presses on my consciousness, and while it’s easy to tolerate a few—like molecules of water—when too many surround me, I can’t breathe.

I can’t think.

They’re just … everywhere.

I’d never tested to see what would happen if I surrounded myself in a crowd in New York City for more than a half hour or so at a time, but I had a feeling it would be bad. I’d walked Times Square before on a Sunday once, when the crowds were in full force. I’d had people brush against me, push against, bump into me, talking as they walked, cell phones to their ear, arguing with their loved ones, laughing with their kids. It was a crush, a glut of humanity, and it felt so close to my consciousness it was like they were poured raw into my mind. They were there, laid bare before me, all humanity and feelings and emotions, and I felt overwhelmed.

I’d needed to retreat to my hotel room after only a few minutes, closing myself off in the closet, no light, fingers in my ears, letting the noise and feeling and talking and living recede into the distance.

“So …” Allyn Welch said, breaking the silence between us as we honked our way across the RFK Bridge between Randalls and Wards Islands and Manhattan, the whole of Manhattan laid out before us. Fortunately he’d rolled the windows up after we’d left LaGuardia, because I had a feeling, based on the number of cars in front of me belching smoke out their tailpipes, that the air quality around us had taken a precipitous drop. Talk about not being able to breathe.

“You sent for me and I am here,” I said, steeling myself for entry to the city of New York. I hoped I wouldn’t feel buried in the crowds during this assignment, but I was a big girl and occasionally I had to confront my fears and the psychological damage from being raised in isolation. Because that’s what grown-ups do in the real world. “What’s the what?”

“The … what?” Welch gave me a frown so deep his crow’s feet looked like they were opening box canyons at the ends.

“Never mind,” I said, looking out at the city through the window. “Why did you break the glass if you didn’t see an emergency?”

He got that one, and went all introspective on me, nodding and looking out at the sea of traffic ahead of us. “You ever get that feeling in your gut? The one that tells you something’s wrong?”

“Usually after I’ve had White Castle in the middle of the night, but yeah,” I said, flashing him a smile. He looked at me blankly, and I suppressed a sigh. “Cop instinct, sure,” I said, letting my brilliant joke go to waste.

“I got that feeling here,” Welch said. “And if I’m wrong when it comes up on a normal case … maybe somebody dies. Bad news, right? But the NYPD can handle the perp afterward. I get that feeling on a meta case …” He looked at me with purpose. “I break the damned glass.”

“Nicely brought around.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I get this wrong … worse happens than a little murder. Here we’ve got people with powers and all possible sorts of trouble.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I didn’t see what Captain Frost said—”

“It wasn’t anything major,” Welch said. “I’ll show you the video at the precinct, but it’s not the sort of thing that’s going to trip many triggers.”

“But it tripped yours?”

“Maybe I’m just an old cop in a new world,” Welch said, which I thought was a pretty brave admission, though obviously the comb-over was a good tipoff. “Not gonna lie, I’m still pretty uneasy that the Mayor’s office lets these ‘heroes’ go running through the city unchecked.”

I held my tongue, mostly because I didn’t have a well-formed opinion about this new phenomenon. Metahumans had mostly been held in check—publicly, at least, kept in secret, for thousands of years—until President Gerry Harmon decided to out us on national television. It probably wasn’t a bad call, since I was in dragon form, battling a supreme evil over Minneapolis at the moment he chose to make his announcement. That might have been hard to explain if he hadn’t come clean.

But this idea of heroes, powered people straight out of comic books, defending their cities and waging war against evil? That was new. Other than me, I meant. I’d set loose the first hero on Atlanta about a year ago, Taneshia French, and she’d done a pretty good job of improving her neighborhood and the city in general. I knew her, and I trusted her.

These other heroes, though? I knew what I’d seen of Gravity Gal, and she seemed like a low-profile, keep-her-mouth-shut-and-do-her-job type. I liked her.

Captain Frost, though? He was like Kat unchecked, and that bothered me, because I was constantly checking Kat to keep her from being a giant idiot.

“It doesn’t bother you that I’m playing Luke Cage nowadays?” I asked, and realized a second later that I’d thrown another reference at Welch that was bound to soar over his head. “I mean—”

“Hero for Hire, I got it,” Welch said, and a smile poked out as he looked over at me. “I used to read the comics as a kid.” He let the levity pass and went serious again. “I guess, maybe because of the way you started—working for the government and all that—it doesn’t bother me as much.” He gave me a slightly sour look. “But if you could keep from trashing any subway trains this time—”

“You never let that one go, jeez. I saved all the gold in the Federal Reserve, but no one remembers that.”

“Anyway,” Welch said, and I saw the end of the bridge in sight, but the FDR looked like it was packed with cars. Welch saw it, too, and another pronounced frown wrinkled him all the way to the eyes. “I just want you to hang around for a bit, like a soothing balm, in case noses get out of joint.”

I passed by the mixed metaphor and went straight to his intent. “Have you met me? Of the many things I’ve been called, soothing? … Not so much one of them.”

“Well, add it to your repertoire,” Welch said and honked his horn pointlessly before giving a massive sigh.

“Might as well try something new,” I said. “How long am I gonna be here?” He looked over at me again, and I clarified. “In New York, not on this bridge. I know, based on the traffic, that we’re going to die of old age here. You much sooner than me, obvs.”

That got me a scowl followed by a smile. “Why do you ask, so long as the money keeps flowing into your company’s account?”

“Well, the State Fair is coming up, you know,” I said, looking over at the Bronx. When he didn’t say anything, I turned back to see him looking perplexed. “It’s like a religious holiday in Minnesota. The Great Minnesota Get-Together, they call it. It’s a big deal,” I finished lamely.

“Hopefully not too long,” Welch said, turning his attention back to the immovable line of traffic in front of us. I thought about getting out, lifting the car and flying us back to the precinct, but figured that might be too much for even the city of New York to fight the FAA over, so I settled myself against the window. We inched forward a little at a time, in silence, as the sun tilted ever closer to the western horizon before us, and onward toward nightfall.