Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (7 page)

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.”

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 on 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.

And Blackstone couldn’t tell Max what we knew; the FBI had confirmed it to be The Box, the one they’d been watching. And that meant…what? Pellegrini had known the feds had been using the box as a trap, so he’d had it “picked up.” But why hire someone when the Wreckers had shown they were as capable of in-smash-out as anyone? It wasn’t like the feds would think the heist had been ordered by someone
else
.

It was Blackstone’s job to ask what it all meant—Jacky’s, too, if she ever took him up on his standing offer to come back for good—but even if there was no discernable connection between the bank job and my dream the knot in my stomach wouldn’t go away. The Sentinels go out of town, and suddenly old business was back.
All
my old business.

You’re being paranoid, Hope.
I ignored Jacky’s past observations on the subject of paranoia.

Paperwork done, I found the rest of the team hanging out in the Clubhouse—Jamal’s name for the Young Sentinels’ common room.

Everyone says that girls are more emotionally evolved than boys, but sometimes I wonder. Brian sat talking to Kindrake like her dragon hadn’t eaten him less than two days ago.
I
held an unworthy grudge, and I hadn’t even been the victim.
 
Typically, Reese was trying to edge into their conversation; buried in Goth makeup or not, Kindrake was reasonably cute and the self-evident fact that she just didn’t seem to be into
him
made her that much more irresistible.

Jamal and Shell—physically present in her prosthetic body—were still playing Halo. His fingers moved too fast for natural reflexes, which meant he had to be speeding but... I laughed and shook my head when everyone looked at me. From the speed of the enemy on the screen, Shell was ticking up the clock-time in the game to match Jamal.

“Boss?” Mal asked.
He
was typically studying, although he’d already been accepted to the University of Chicago.

“At ease, everybody.” I’d left my cape, mask, and gloves in my rooms—in an emergency I could always grab a set on the way out. I chose a couch opposite the chatty trio, slouching down next to Ozma. She sat quietly, knitting lace. I didn’t ask.

“And don’t call me boss.”
Because it completely freaks me out
. “Fearless leader if you really must. Anyway, we’re still all grounded—they let me out to play this morning because I’m the only A Class flying brick in town today and something came up.”

Kindrake had the grace to look guilty, and I tried to think nicer thoughts.

“She seems to like our Brian,” Ozma observed quietly, tucking her legs up to give me room. So much for nicer thoughts. And that wasn't right; whatever stupid choices she'd made before, Kindrake was here and apologizing to the right person—taking it any other way was just wrong. I looked away and caught Ozma’s smile, the one that said she was aware of my problem.

I
liked
Brian. It was as simple and as stupid as that. After my false-positive alarm with Seven, I’d wondered if I was still able to “fall in love,” or at least the heart-pounding, attention focusing, love euphoria that Shell blamed on oxytocin and dopamine. It turned out I still could, and I wasn’t happy about it.

Shell’s theory was that I’d imprinted on Brian when he’d rescued me, and it had certainly been a high-stress moment, but this time I flatly refused to play. I wasn’t the kind of girl Brian went in for, and that was okay, really. And in retrospect, I knew I hadn’t fallen for Seven because if I really
had
then I would have been too scared to risk it. The way I felt about Brian… if I got crushed again I wouldn’t be able to stay. Or he wouldn’t, and he had to; in a weird way, Ozma—and Nox and Nix—had become his family.

So I’d have to go join Heroes Without Borders or the Hollywood Knights or something, and that wasn’t going to happen either. It was what it was, and I’d get over it. I’d grown up that much, at least.

“One little drop of Love’s Measure would clear that right up,” Ozma murmured without looking up from her needles.

I barely kept from rolling my eyes. Using magic to play with people’s minds wasn’t exactly verboten in her rulebook; she’d turn you into a contented hat and then use crystalized Water of Oblivion to wipe your memory of it afterward if she didn’t feel you deserved to keep the experience as a lesson (a favor she hadn’t done for Spinner), but I’d been relieved to find we drew the same line at anything that shaded into brainwashing. So her offer was a dig and a test, and not a nice one. Which was totally Ozma; she was royal, she was courteous, she was Good, but she wasn’t
nice
.

Nice hadn’t ruled a small empire for a hundred years, and nice wouldn’t liberate Oz.

She made a final twist with her needles and neatly bit off the threads, spreading it out so I could see it: a short ribbon of delicate snowflake lace, so white it seemed to glow.

“Moonmoth silk.”

“Okay…”

Instead of explaining, she took my hand and wound it round my ring-finger, tying it into a neat little bow so that it made a tiny lace ring. “Don’t take it off until you have to.” she whispered and leaned in to kiss my cheek, soft as the brush of a falling petal. A bloom of warmth pulsed where she touched my skin, echoed in my finger where the lace hugged it tight.

I rubbed my cheek. Amazingly nobody else even blinked. Only Grendel seemed to be looking our way at all.

“Well, thank you? I didn’t get you anything?”

She laughed quietly, an innocently inscrutable sweet-sixteen centenarian. “You will. Remember, do not take it off too soon. The Question Box said you will be traveling a long way today. Alone.”

I froze, breath caught. “Then what—”

“
Astra
,” Blackstone spoke in my earbug. “
I need you to get your go-bag and go now. You are meeting your ride over Ohio
.”

Sometimes I really do hate magic.

I ran. “How long will I be gone? Where am I going?”

“
Classified. This comes through DSA channels
.”

I stumbled and stopped. The DSA. Now I knew where I was going and wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. Alone?

“
Astra
?”

I got going. “I’m here. I— What’s happening?”

“
I don’t know, my dear.
The call came from Director Kayle’s office.
 
Your help is requested and required, and you’ve been called up through your Illinois State Militia officer’s commission
.”

That almost stopped me again. Our state commissions were partly intended to
protect
capes like us from getting drafted by Washington—which meant the DSA had had to get hold of the
governor
and get his permission to activate me while I’d been showering and doing paperwork. Telling myself that this had to be a good thing didn’t stop the churning in my stomach. What was going
on
?

The elevator doors didn’t close fast enough for me, and I spent the seconds before they opened on the bay spinning in my head. Every question I wanted to ask would just have led back to “classified,” so I didn’t. “Understood, sir. The review? The team?”

“
Will be taken care of. Your testimony is recorded and if there are further questions then they can wait. Good luck, Astra
.”

The doors opened and it took just seconds for me to pull the rest of my uniform off my designated rack. Sliding my gloves on, I was careful of Ozma’s gift. Go-bag over my shoulder, I launched up and out of the still opening hatch. “Shell?”

“Right here!” Shell floated beside me. “What the hell is going
on
?”

“Like I know? Shell…” I swallowed the thickening lump in my throat. Sunday was two days away, but… “I need you to tell Mom and Dad I probably won’t be to Mass and dinner Sunday, that I’m away for a while and they won’t be hearing from me. Tell them everything’s okay.”

“No worries, I’ll cancel for us.”

“No! You should go. And—” I’d forgotten about Julie. The lump got worse. “I need you to keep my promise with Julie tonight. Please.”