by Rob Rogers
Julian stared at him. Most people, seeing him in his uniform, were intimidated. It wasn’t the uniform so much—it was more utilitarian than designed to strike fear in others’ hearts. It was more the concept of it. I am faceless, the uniform told those he encountered. I will not hesitate to do whatever the hell I want. I am separate from you. I am more than you. This man barely seemed to notice. Julian felt hot, all of a sudden, in the uniform. He didn’t particularly like using his powers against others. He didn’t particularly like fighting.
“This is how this is going to work,” he said. “You’re going to leave now. Or I’m going to throw you off the building.” He spread his gloved hands. The mustard-yellow cloth on his arms was tight against his skin.
“You know what Zhdanov can do?” the man asked. “You saw what she did to that orderly you clunked over the head?”
Julian blinked. There had been no cameras in the hallway; he’d made sure of that. He wondered how the man knew what he knew.
“The orderly’s name was Thomas Dickerson,” the man continued. “He played piano at the Tyler Lane First Baptist Church, and sometimes he played for the patients in the common room. His favorite song was ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and he had a weakness for sweet potato pie.”
“Enough,” Julian said. “I’m sorry that man died, I really am. I kind of lost control of her for a minute. She just bent down and—” He broke off. “But you—you I’ll kill without hesitation if I need to.” He thought about walking across the roof to the man, but instead, he took flight, hovering two feet off the ground, drifting slowly, relentlessly toward the man. “They call me Scion,” he said. “If you’ve read the papers, you know that I’m not afraid to hurt people. It’s time for you to go.”
The man stepped off the ledge onto the rooftop, legs spread carefully, distributing his weight. As Julian moved closer to him, the man pulled his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves. “You know,” he said, “I should really talk through this with you. Open a dialogue. Establish a rapport. Convince you that Olena Zhdanov is no use to you and that you would be best served by turning her over to the authorities.” With two deft yanks, he unknotted his tie and pulled it off, stuffing it into a pocket. “But the truth is that I’m in the mood for a fight.” He spread his arms and gestured at Julian with his fingertips—the gesture a clear challenge to move closer.
Julian actually hesitated for a moment. He wondered if the man was secretly hiding a gun. He remembered the pain he’d felt when Jason had been shot. What in the hell was making this man so confident? And then he rushed forward.
* * * * *
Cain was unsure of his own motivations. It was one thing to postulate that a flying man had rescued or kidnapped Olena Zhdanov, and then to find evidence supporting that hypothesis. It was quite another thing to see the man actually flying. It was one thing to realize that his senses were sharper than other people’s, and another to challenge a notorious criminal with superhuman powers to a brawl. He’d found as he climbed the building that he was stronger than he’d expected; he’d been able to tell the most dependable spots on the building to place his hands and feet and, a few times, he’d simply driven his fingertips into the surface of the building like an ice climber chiseling handholds for himself. But that, too, was a long way from fighting someone with Scion’s reputation.
Scion wore a full-length uniform of dark yellow and black, crisscrossed with brown leather straps across his chest. His face was covered by a mask, but below the mask, Cain could see a short beard and a set jaw. Cain smelled his aftershave and, somewhere in the distance, tandoori chicken. The night air was humid, hot, and polluted. He could hardly see the stars. He could hear his own heart pounding. Scion’s, too.
When Scion finally made his move, it was with a speed that Cain could barely process. He swooped forward into a tackle, slamming into Cain’s chest and driving him to the surface of the roof, which promptly fractured under the strain. Chunks of concrete, plaster, wood, and steel broke free and began to tumble down below. A jut of metal sliced through Cain’s shirt and into his back, scraping against a rib. He gasped in pain and raised his arms to push Scion away, but the masked man was too fast for him again. He jabbed Cain in the eye with his right hand, then followed it with a left to the jaw that loosened Cain’s teeth. Cain tasted coppery blood.
Using the crumbling rooftop to push himself up to his knees, Cain tried again to raise his arms to protect himself from the flying man who hovered over him, punching him again and again, a strange, dissociative calm in his eyes. Cain finally managed to block one hit, grabbing hold of the other man’s arm and pushing it to the side, and to deliver a punch of his own. Despite his aches, he could feel the force in his blow, and Scion rocked back, raising a hand to his jaw.
Then Scion said, “The hell with this.” He flew backward, away from Cain for a second, and then pivoted his body, rushing forward again, grabbing Cain by the right arm and the left leg. He lifted Cain from the roof and then, with a grunt and a heave, hurled him over the side of the building.
The two hardest punches I ever took were in Devil’s Cape. The first one was Pepe’s right hook. The second one was also Pepe’s right hook, about half a second later.
— Excerpted from an interview with retired boxer Marty Blank, Sports Illustrated
Chapter Thirty-Three
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
5 p.m.
Kate Brauer had spent two exhausting days training with Samuel.
She’d protested again, the morning after their run along Lady Danger River, as he led her into Pepe’s Athletic Center on Miller Avenue, that she needed to be concentrating on her armor far more than her body. The center—named for Pepe “The Diable Dodger” Matehuala, the famed welterweight—had once been a gathering place for many of the city’s boxers. It still sported framed black-and-white photos of athletes from times past; old gloves hanging from pegs, their leather cracking; and a row of brightly colored speed bags along one wall. But the center’s boxing ring had been yanked out, its old, nicked floors covered with mauve carpeting. And the place fairly bristled with chrome—free weights, treadmills, stationary bikes, rowing machines, and more. Now it catered to working professionals looking for exercise on their lunch hours, and Kate wondered what old Pepe might have thought.
Samuel had gestured her over to an elliptical trainer, showing her the routine he intended for her to work. “I was the Storm Raiders’ athletic trainer, you know,” he said, keeping his voice low.
Resigned to it, she began working the machine, feeling her already sore muscles begin to protest the new routine.
“Really?” she said. It surprised her for some reason.
“Yeah,” he said. “Patriot was a natural athlete because of her powers. She could wake up and sprint all day if she wanted to, probably carrying a car on her shoulders. But that was from her powers. She never had to work at it.”
He stopped her for a second, adjusted the angle of the handlebars, and nodded at her to start again. “The Swashbucklers were trained athletes, of course.”
The first Swashbuckler had been her Uncle Charles. After he’d died from leukemia, a young Bosnian decathlete named Alija Spiric took over his name and uniform.
Samuel chuckled. “They were a lot alike. Full of flash, impatient, and absolutely lousy at telling anyone else how to work out.” He shrugged. “So it was me. The Winged Tornado used to be a competitive bicycler—did you know he rode in the Tour de France against Lance Armstrong?—before he grew his wings. He was pretty good at coaching. But by the time he joined the team, everybody was used to going to me for lessons, so that was that.”
Uncle Samuel gestured at her to pick up the pace. “One time in Vanguard City,” he said softly, “we were fighting Mirrorman. We didn’t realize it, but he’d rigged up some sort of shunt that allowed him to redirect electrical charges.” He shrugged, moved her hands to a higher position on the handlebars
, twiddled with a knob to increase the tension. “Raiden hated Mirrorman—in addition to his other unappealing traits, Mirrorman was a raving bigot, especially against Asians. And we knew from experience that he wouldn’t . . . ah, crack and give us seven years’ bad luck if we hit him hard.” He chuckled at his joke. “He was a pretty tough guy.”
Samuel leaned closer, keeping his voice pitched low. “So Raiden let loose at him with a lightning bolt. I can’t remember how many volts that was.”
“Probably several hundred million,” Kate said, remembering that Raiden’s electrical output had compared favorably with the average thunderstorm.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. He tightened the tension knob a little more. “Don’t slow down,” he told her. “You’ve got to keep your heart rate up.”
She flicked him a reproving look, but kept up her pace. “Your story,” she said, her voice coming out more of a pant than she liked.
“Yeah, so Raiden blasted him full in the chest. But Mirrorman used this shunt and bounced the lightning bolt right into your dad.”
She blinked. The Doctor Camelot armor was insulated, of course. She’d added additional insulation to what her father had had, and she used far less metal in her armor, relying more on ceramics and carbon polymers. But an electrical charge of that magnitude could still be devastating, particularly to the less advanced version her father had used.
Samuel smiled and nodded at her reaction. “Uh huh,” he said. “You see where I’m going with this. Your dad’s armor was fried. He wasn’t too hurt—just a little shaken up, and it singed his hair some.” He chuckled. “Made it stand on end, too, just like in the cartoons.” He tapped on the machine. “But there he was, stuck with 150 pounds of dead weight. Fell on his back like a turtle and had a time of it getting back to his feet, and then he pretty much had to beat a slow retreat while the rest of us took out Mirrorman.” He pointed a finger at her. “And that’s why you’re going to keep working out like this.”
And that had settled that. He’d put her through a variety of torturous exercise regimens, dictated her diet, forced her to step away from her designs and get extra sleep at night. “This won’t be forever,” he’d said. “Once you get to the point where you’re in really A-class shape, we’ll cut back some. You’ll go on maintenance exercises, just an hour or two a day, and we’ll have one or two of those beignets and some café au lait, like you wanted. But we need you to do this now.”
There’d been a heavy workout that day. But tonight, she thought as she headed back to her new home, was going to be something special. Tonight she was taking the new Doctor Camelot armor out for its first test flight.
The rate of gravitational acceleration on Earth is approximately 9.81 meters per second per second.
— Excerpted from a physics textbook
Chapter Thirty-Four
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
7:30 p.m.
When Jason had seen his brother arrive at Uncle Costas’s food distribution plant, and then had seen Ducett following him out, he’d decided to pursue the two of them a different way. He dressed as Argonaut, flying high into the Devil’s Cape smog, obscuring himself in the night. It wasn’t too difficult to follow the cars, even from a great height.
The night air stank of pollution typical to Devil’s Cape—smoke from a nearby paper mill, diesel fumes, car exhaust, rotting fish and vegetation, a landfill—but it was still exhilarating to fly, especially to fly fast to keep up with the cars. The air rushed around him in a soft roar that drowned out the noise of the city. His cape flapped in the wind. And the broad panorama of Devil’s Cape was spread before him. The neon and raucous parties of the Silver Swan district. The barges moving along Lake Pontchartrain. The night traffic of the Canal View Highway.
When Julian parked at the decrepit warehouse, Jason hovered and watched with interest as he saw his brother pulling on his uniform, which Jason had never seen him in. Their uniforms weren’t really all that different. Jason’s was blue and gold and brown where Julian’s was mustard yellow and black. And Jason had a cape and protective white lenses over his eyes—for all the good they’d done him when he’d been shot—while Julian had neither. But the cuts of the uniforms and the shapes of the masks were very nearly the same. Just one more connection between them.
When Julian—dressed as Scion now—ascended the building, Jason flew down and landed at a slightly taller building a block away, wishing he had brought his binoculars. He’d watched in fascination as the psychiatrist, who had parked his own car not far from Jason, moved to the building and began to scale its side.
He recognized the warehouse, now that he’d given it some thought. It belonged to his Uncle Costas, but had been abandoned after it had suffered some structural damage. The Devil’s Cape police department had had its eye on the place at one time, then stopped caring about it when it was obvious that the Kalodimos crime family had moved out.
He’d seen Julian and Ducett talking—they were too far away for him to make out what they were saying—and then looked on with some dismay as they began to fight. He felt the sudden pain when Julian was punched in the jaw. He was uncertain whether to intervene. He had finally decided that he needed to get over there and break up the fight when he saw, with surprised shock, that his brother had thrown the other man from the building.
“Oh, hell,” he said. Jason streaked toward the condemned warehouse, arms outstretched, moving as quickly as he could.
But he could tell that he’d never make it to Ducett in time.
* * * * *
Cain fell.
One of the negative aspects of having sharply acute senses was that he could tell with some precision the extent to which his body was accelerating as it approached the ground below. He didn’t scream, but the air whipping past him sounded like a scream anyway. His shirt was ripping in the wind. His shoes fell off. His face, chest, and back were on fire from Scion’s battering—not that that was likely to be a concern for long.
Cain fell.
Images rushed through his mind. Shoving Jazz back against the asphalt. Dustin Bilbray waddling away from him in terror. 5-D Binoe crying. Shouting at Mr. Marcus. The day Tyrell Smith tried to stab him with the toothbrush shiv. Salazar Lorca’s sad, wise face. Jazz’s eyes filled with blood. Olena Zhdanov sobbing and breaking her knuckles on the glass divider. Thomas Dickerson’s shriveled body. Scion’s masked face.
Cain fell.
The air roaring around him, heart pumping, eyes tearing from the wind and reaction, Cain’s mind filled with his hallucination again, the devil creature. In his imagination, he felt fine scarlet and black hairs growing on every inch of his body. His fingers elongated, dark claws scratching through the night air. Long, twisted horns sprouted from his scalp. His teeth grew jagged, needle-sharp canines protruding from his lower jaw almost to his cheekbones. His irises turned as red as Jazz’s eyes. Red as blood. His veins pulsed hot. His shirt tore into pieces as his muscles bulged, the fragments catching the air and fluttering away from his body like doves. His feet stretched and warped, curving around their arches like talons. Venous flaps of skin stretched out from his arms to his sides, extending down his rib cage like bats’ wings.
Cain fell.
Seeing the ground approaching so close, the rigid, controlled Cain Ducett let out a low moan of terror. It came out as a growl. Blood and fire and thoughts of the monster filled his mind, and it galled him that he was about to die filled with such images. The hell with it, he thought, spreading his arms wide to meet his fate.
And then Cain Ducett flew.
His outstretched arms caught the air and he was yanked upward, his fall turning into a sudden ascent. His breath went out of him and he gasped, choked. He began to fall again and he batted his arms wildly. He found himself propelled upward once more, the motion coming more naturally now.
Cain had a keen, disciplined, analytical mind. That mind was moving full-speed now,
suggesting and rejecting dozens of possible explanations for what he was experiencing, though he knew on some level that there was really only one explanation: The hallucination of turning into a devil creature wasn’t a hallucination at all. It never had been.
Spreading his arms, Cain spiraled his body down, landing safely on the ground on feet that felt foreign to him—broad and long and clawed. “Oh, God, Jazz,” he whispered, his voice a rasp. “What did you do to me?” He stared at his hands and arms. They were more heavily muscled than he had ever seen them, covered with fine fur, a dusky scarlet. His fingers ended in sharp black claws. He touched his face. It was warped—the lower jaw jutting out, teeth protruding from the mouth, the ears hugely elongated, horns erupting from his head.
“Oh, God,” he whispered again. Fear and shock were in his voice, but there was also exultation.
* * * * *
Jazz was dozing in her room, black satin sheets pulled over her body, when it happened. She had slept little since the Robber Baron had visited her, and the sleep she managed was shallow, troubled, and at odd hours. When she felt Cain’s curse activate again, felt him shift into the form she had created for him, she sat upright in her bed, staring at the black walls. “Oh,” she whispered into the darkness. “It is about damn time.”
She had kept a shard of broken mirror propped on a teak end table beside her bed. She bent over it now, staring into it, watching her eyes fill with blood as they did when she worked her magics. “Come to me, Cain!” she shouted, her voice filling the small room. “It’s time to come to me!”
* * * * *
Racing hopelessly to catch Ducett before he hit the ground, racing to stop his brother from becoming a murderer again, Jason saw the psychiatrist’s metamorphosis with shocked disbelief. The plummeting Ducett stretched and elongated. Black and red hairs grew from his skin. He sprouted horns and claws and wing flaps under his arms. He looked like the devil himself. And then suddenly he spread his arms, stopping his fall. He beat his arms gracelessly for a few seconds, rising and falling in the air, then slowly spread his wings and glided to a landing on the ground below.
