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

The video started up like I remembered, with Gravity Gal delivering some well-placed critique that slapped the snot out of Nadine Griffin. Her face got all frozen, and then Captain Frost’s turn came up.

“If your moral compass involves taking a survey in order to decide what’s right, you’re doing it
wrong
.” I watched Gravity Gal deliver what one of the commenters had declared a “sick burn!!” with a wary eye. Her voice rang with conviction, which was why the critique probably stung Frost so hard.

I hit the pause button as the camera zoomed in on Captain Frost’s face. Gravity Gal was already shooting up into the air, and I watched her go. I’d seen enough videos to have figured out she didn’t have flight powers like I did. What she had used was something I’d seen once before, which was a command of gravity itself. She seemed to be able to reverse it to push herself up or around, but only if she had a solid object to work with. She arced her way through the air like a thrown ball, pushing herself back up when she sagged, like she was walking on a giant, invisible pair of stilts. The news camera caught her pushing off a nearby building with unseen force, launching south toward Staten Island, which seemed to be where she was from. Again, this was according to the news broadcasts I’d seen and the dossier J.J. had put together for me.

The camera caught Captain Frost’s reaction after Gravity Gal had shot off. They zoomed in on it, just to be sure. He looked he was probably a handsome enough guy beneath the cowl mask that covered his cheeks and face, leaving only holes for his eyes, but his square jaw just begged to be punched, what with all the arrogance that dripped off him. He watched Gravity Gal as she left Wall Street behind, and shouted something angry as hell after her that was lost under the crowd noise. I caught, with my enhanced meta hearing, “—you’ll see!” and that was about it.

“What do you think?” Welch said, looking like he needed a pat on the head.

That was not normally my thing, but like I said, I was trying to be reassuring to the guy who was paying me. “He does look mad,” I concluded with a frown. I didn’t get any of his gut feeling out of it, but I couldn’t deny that Frost was more than a little red-faced at Gravity Gal as she flew off. “I should probably talk to him,” I went on. “See if I can track him down, maybe have a heart-to-heart, get my own sense of him. He could have just been blowing off steam, after all. She did, uh …”

“Kick him in the jimmies?” Welch asked with a smirk.

“On live TV and internet, no less,” I said. “You know how it is with people that have power—big egos and all that.”

“I don’t, actually,” he said with a shrug. “I only deal with metas through you.”

“Oh, I wasn’t just talking about metas,” I said, standing up. I adjusted my short sleeve shirt and wished it was jacket season. My tee was black, my jeans were loose, but the only thing I was carrying in the form of a weapon was the sort of thing legally allowable in New York. So basically a pen and myself. “Anyone who’s got power tends to have a little bit of an ego to go with it. If you’re lucky, though, there’s some humility to keep them out of trouble.”

Welch smiled faintly. “And you have humility, then?”

“Most days, it’s the only thing keeping me out of jail,” I said, folding my arms in front of me. “How do I find Captain Frost?”

Welch put two fingers in his mouth and literally whistled. I blanched because it was especially loud to my meta ears, but a thirty-something guy with a fresh face came popping up behind me a moment later. “You called, Lieutenant?”

“Richardson,” Welch said, like people just came whenever he whistled for them all the time. “Any idea where Captain Frost is right now?”

“Yes sir,” Richardson said crisply. He had a manner about him that told me that in another time and place, I would have enjoyed smacking him in the nose like one of those blowup clown punching bags. He probably wouldn’t pop back up like those, though. Richardson just smiled contently as he answered, clearly unaware of my nascent desire to do violence to his nose. “He’s holding a fan meet-up in Times Square right now. He’s at the Starbucks on the north end at—”

“Got it,” I said, and headed for the door.

“You need a ride?” Welch asked after me, like he already knew the answer.

“Nah,” I said, “I’ll just fly over and have a quick chat.” I did a spin and walked backward, looking supercool as I smirked with all my confidence. “Plus, I kinda wanna stop at Shake Shack on the way there, so …”

“Best of luck,” Welch called after me. “And … try not to destroy anything, will ya?”

“You’re lucky I’ve got humility, Lieutenant,” I said over my shoulder, ribbing the poor bastard as I stepped into one of the offices and unlocked a window before I squeezed my way out into the night, “because otherwise, that might have hurt my massive ego.” I caught him shaking his head and smiling as I flew off into the sky, to get myself a burger, a shake, and a good talk with the blissfully self-unaware douche who had named himself Captain Frost.

Kyra was waiting in silence when Jamie got home a little after nine. The TV was on, and Jamie could see the CW symbol in the bottom corner of the screen, a repeat of some show or another playing out with teens and young adults having a dramatic conversation against a dark, brooding background.

Jamie shut the door behind her and put her keys on the counter, trying to summon up the mental energy for the fight that she knew was coming. “It’s after your bedtime,” she said, starting quietly. She always started quietly, and mostly stayed quiet. It was Kyra who took the decibels to new levels.

“I’m just watching my show,” Kyra said, not making a move to comply with the rules. Jamie leaned against the kitchen counter, marshaling up her righteous indignation. “It’ll be done in a little bit.”

“Kyra,” Jamie said, and it came out in a low sort of sigh, “you know your bedtime is nine o’clock. And this is a rerun anyway.”

Kyra bristled visibly on the couch without even turning her head. Her posture got stiffer, more straight, and Jamie could tell she was gearing up for the battle, too. “I’m sixteen, not two. I don’t need a bedtime anymore.”

“But you have one,” Jamie said. She didn’t want to escalate this. The rules were the rules, and Kyra might have been pushing at them constantly lately, but that didn’t mean anything good would come from her pushing back. “There are rules. Dress codes. Curfews. Bedtime … someday you’ll be all grown up and you won’t have to worry about me telling you what to do anymore. But for now … you’ve got summer school tomorrow and you need to be rested for it.” She braced for the inevitable return fire. The fact that Kyra had needed summer school at all had been a major source of friction between the two of them.

Kyra’s head snapped around, outrage flashing through her eyes. “I like how you get to run my life and I don’t.”

“Well, have a daughter of your own and you can run—or ruin—her life like I do yours,” Jamie replied, and then softened her tone. “The rules are for your own good and you know it. If you don’t pass summer school—”

“
Fine
,” Kyra said, though it obviously wasn’t. She stood up abruptly and left, retreating with a slam of her door that heralded nothing good. It didn’t even feel like closure for their current argument, which was just a continuously running battle on all fronts lately.

Jamie slumped into the barstool seat next to the counter. “Why is everything suddenly so difficult?” she wondered aloud. Kyra hadn’t always been like this. She’d been mostly easy until a few months ago, and since then … it was like she was a different kid. Summer school had been like a flashpoint for the whole problem.

Maybe it’s because her mother isn’t around very much anymore
. The thought was a cold knife-blade of guilt right to her heart.

Jamie’s stomach was starting to rumble; she’d skipped lunch and dinner was now late, so maybe it was time to do something about that problem since she’d been dealing with other ones all through the day. She started to get up to turn off the TV, but the picture cut out on its own, and a news alert popped up instead.

“Good evening,” the newscaster, a blond, attractive young lady said once the ALERT screen had clicked off. “We’re interrupting this broadcast to bring you news of a fire raging out of control on West 55
^th
between 9
^th
and 10
^th
Avenues—”

Jamie didn’t wait to hear the rest; she went out the door in a flash, locking it carefully and quietly behind her, pocketing her keys as she started to slip off her clothes in the darkness. She barely had her pants off, leaving them there in the bushes next to the door when she vaulted herself up into the night, soaring over Stapleton, over the quiet rooftops. She heard someone through an open window say, “Who gives a shit! This is Staten Island, not Manhattan, dammit! Go back to the show! No one here cares!”

If only it was that easy to ignore people in danger, Jamie thought wistfully as she caught sight of Freedom Tower lit up in the distance. Anchoring herself to it, she reversed gravity and launched herself toward the island of Manhattan for the second time that day, hoping that she’d get to the fire in time to help.

I was chewing on the most perfect burger as I walked through Times Square. I hadn’t had a problem flying to Shake Shack, because it wasn’t like the streets were super crowded or well-lit from the precinct to the location on 8
^th
where I got my food, but I figured given the amount of lights and foot traffic, I’d probably get seen flying around Times Square, and I doubted that would give Lieutenant Welch any reassurance. More like ulcers.

I had a shake in my other hand, too, and it was peanut butter perfection. I felt like I was in perfect bliss, the crowds around me nothing more than a minor inconvenience rather than cause for panic and fleeing. I took a bite of my bacon and pepper-covered burger with one hand, then raised the shake to my lips a few seconds later for a dose of happiness.

I bumped into like five people and sent them sprawling, but I maintained my Zen all the way to Starbucks, which seemed like a fair trade. Watch where you’re going, people.

Even better, no one had screamed, “It’s her!” or anything of the sort, probably figuring me for just another tourist. Or maybe they were simply too cool to care if they did recognize me. I had stopped and bought a baseball hat that simply said
New York
on it, and I had the bill pulled way down, so it’s also possible that my disguise was so perfect that no one looked beyond their obvious disgust at another tourist in their midst.

Ha ha, New York. You’re too cool for your own good. Never change.

I walked past the windows at the Starbucks twice in order to surveil the scene before I went bursting in. I might also have finished up my shake and burger, because walking into a restaurant with another establishment’s food in hand felt too tacky even for carefree me to pull it off. Captain Frost was Captain Obvious here, taking up half the seating area on one side of the coffee shop, his admiring fans a little too close and admiring for my comfort. I judged him silently in the two passes I took while scouting the place, watching him tell animated stories to his little groupies and trying not to throw up my fabulous dinner in disgust at how crassly he was dishonoring our profession. We weren’t rockstars, dammit, and if I slept with my groupies—all three of them—I’m pretty sure there would have been reams of newsprint calling me a slut or something.

I came into the Starbucks keeping my profile low, still hiding behind the bill of my hat as I listened to Frost. “… up in the tree,” he said, snatches of his tale wafting across the restaurant as two girls who looked like they’d get thrown out of any nightclub that served alcohol hung on his words, spellbound, his arms around each of their necks, drawing them close as they drooled in his lap. Frost looked relaxed, confident, and I cringed for the dignity of my putative profession. I mean, I didn’t put on Spandex and soar over the skyline in the grandiose style he’d chosen, but still … I was like the world’s first superhero, and this was just below our dignity, I thought.

Hell, this was below Keith Richards’s dignity.

I drifted closer to the story, getting little bits and pieces. “… and when I got him down, you could just see the gratitude on her face …” Frost said, glowing with pride that looked a little fake—or at least applied with a trowel by a ham-handed idiot. His audience was eating it all up, and mentally I filled in the blanks I’d missed: He’d saved a kitten from a tree, and then slept with the owner, a fading beauty in her thirties who had probably been grateful for the chance to bump uglies with fame.

I thought about voicing all this as a cautionary tale to the floozies who had Frost’s arms draped around them like pythons, but I suppressed the urge. I know a lost cause when I see one, and by the gleam in their eyes, these sisters were not looking for solidarity. They were looking for superhero d—

Uh. You know.

“Oh, hi,” Frost said, directing his attention to me. “Come on in, join the group.” I froze, like I’d been caught peeping at someone’s window, as about thirty heads in this little drum circle turned to look at me. “Don’t be shy.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things,” I said, taking off my hat and raising the flag, “shy … not so much one of them.”

“Whoa!” Captain Frost launched to his feet, disentangling himself from his future conquests with meta speed. I was actually worried he might have injured their necks in the process, but the nasty looks they gave me seemed to say that it was only their pride at being quickly discarded that got hurt. “It’s … you,” he said, giving me a look not unlike that which his cabana girls had just been sending his way.

“I don’t know why people say that. It’s so vague and general, it fits everyone.” I stood there, riffing in the middle of his awed groupies. “No matter who you say, ‘It’s you!’ to, yes, it’s them. But they might not be the
them
you’re thinking of—”

“You’re Sienna Nealon,” Frost said, breaking the stunned silence of his fan base first.